Monica E. McTighe - Framed Spaces, Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art (2012)

framed spaces
I N T E R FA C E S : Studies in Visual Culture

E D I T O R S : Mark J. Williams and Adrian W. B. Randolph,
Dartmouth College
This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and

promotes the study of visual culture from a variety of critical and
methodological perspectives. Its impetus derives from the increasing importance of visual signs in everyday life, and from the rapid
expansion of what are termed new media. The broad cultural and
social dynamics attendant to these developments present new
challenges and opportunities across and within the disciplines.
Thesehave resulted in a trans-disciplinary fascination with all things
visual, from high to low, and from esoteric to popular. This series
brings together approaches to visual culture broadly conceived
that assess these dynamics critically and that break new ground in
understanding their effects and implications.
For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit
www.upne.com.
Monica E. McTighe, Framed Spaces: Photography and Memory
in Contemporary Installation Art
Alison Trope, Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of
Hollywood
Nancy Anderson and Michael R. Dietrich, eds., The Educated Eye:
Visual Culture and Pedagogy in the Life Sciences
Shannon Clute and Richard L. Edwards, The Maltese Touch of Evil:
Film Noir and Potential Criticism
Steve F. Anderson, Technologies of History: Visual Media and
the Eccentricity of the Past
Dorothe Brill, Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus
Janine Mileaf, Please Touch: Dada and Surrealist Objects after
the Readymade
Monica E. McTighe
framed
spaces
PHOTOGR APHY
AND MEMORY IN
CO N T E M P O R A R Y
I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T
Dartmouth College Press

Hanover, New Hampshire
Dartmouth College Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McTighe, Monica E.
Framed spaces : photography and memory in contemporary
installation art / Monica E. McTighe. 1st [edition].
pages cm (Interfaces: studies in visual culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-61168-205-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-1-61168-206-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-1-61168-251-9 (ebook)
1. Art and photography.
motives. I.
2. Installations (Art) Themes,
Title.
n72.p5m38 2012
709.04074 dc23
2011051354
contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction
1
ONE
Expanding the Frame

I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T I N T H E 1970 S
23
T WO
The Politics of Representation

A R C H I V E A N D M E M O RY I N T H E W O R K
OF RENE GREEN
72
THREE
The Poetics of Experience

A N N H A M I LTO N S I N S TA L L AT I O N S
A N D P H OTO G R A P H S
116
FOUR
Camera Obscura
MEMORY IN FILM AND VIDEO
I N S TA L L AT I O N S I N T H E
2000 S
164
Conclusion
I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T A N D M E M O RY
201
Notes
209
Bibliography
227
Index
239
acknowledgments
This project could not have been completed without the help and support of
many people. First, a great debt of gratitude is owed Howard Singerman, my
mentor and advisor, whose persistent and generous support of my work has
helped me in co untless ways. In addition, I am grateful to the professors in
the Department of Art History at the University of Virginia who helped me
develop this project, providing financial support and guidance. Tha nks are
owed as well to the Department of Art and Art History at Tufts University and
the Faculty Research Awards Committee at Tufts University whose generous
moral and financial support of my work has helped me complete this project.
In particular, I need to thank my colleague, Eric Rosenberg who has been a
steadfast and generous mentor throughout my time at the university. Than k
you to the knstlerhaus bchsenhausen in Innsbrck, Austria, which provided
me with a f ellowship that contributed to the work in t his book. Additional
thanks are due to my colleagues Gregory Williams and Benjamin Carp, who
read drafts of the chapters, Leslie K. B rown, and Richard Pult and Amanda
Dupuis of the University Press of New England. And m uch gratitude goes
to the artists and others who have been so generous with their time, knowledge, patience, and support, including Tony Cokes, Rene Green, and Javier
Anguera, Ann Hamilton, and Louise Lawler, as well as Janelle Reiring at Metro
Pictures. Thank you to David Karp, who has been by my side through thick
and thin. And last but not least, thank you to my family, especially to my father, E. James McTighe, and my sister, Michele Kendall, who have helped me
in innumerable ways to complete this work. This is for you.
Monica E. McTighe
S O M E R V I L L E , M A S S AC H U S E T T S , 2011
framed spaces
introduction
Across the dark space, two transparent silk chambers float side by side above
oily cemen t floors in t he r ecently vaca ted sp inning mill . Through t he silk
panels of each chamber, the observer can see the silhouettes of two long tables. On each table, video projectors, mounted on a turning mechanism, cast
on the thin silk the image of a line being drawn by a pencil. The space is large,
covering a half-acre with a ceiling supported by metal columns arranged in
a grid pattern. The p rojections sw eep a round t his vast space sometimes
chasing each other, sometimes crossing each other. An image falls on the silk
screens, splits into two, converges with the second projection, and shatters
into four. As the viewer stands there, the sound of the pencil hissing on the
paper fills the humid Virginia air and the pencils sweep across the viewers
body, the forest of metal columns supporting the ceiling, and finally the cinderblock walls of the empty spinning mill.
Later, when the viewer sees photographs of this installation, ghost: a border
act (2000), in a retrospective catalog of the artist Ann Hamiltons work, they
do not capture the complexity of her exp erience of the installation. The reproduced photograph, thin, bounded clearly by its edge, and difficult to read
because of the dim light in the space, seems to bear little relationship to the
installation that the viewer saw and experienced. Photographs, however, are
necessary for a hist orian of site-specific installation art, as her ob ject of research once exhibited often no longer exists, having been disassembled and
stored, or dispersed. Fortunately, many installations are photographed, and
in the course of their research historians study these photographs carefully.
Although installation art is often assumed to be an art of direct experience,
it is often mediated by photography. If installation art requires the presence
F R A M E D S PAC E S
of a viewer, what does it mean when the majority of viewers see them only in
photographs? As scholars have found, the history of ephemeral art objects
and events, such as in stallation art, is filtered through the memories of the
people who saw them first hand. These memories are often solidified or distorted by t he do cumentation t hat is p ublished alongside t he work. Photographs mediate memory; history is a representation often constructed from
these bits of evidence.
For instance, with Ann Hamiltons ghost: a border act, the viewer went on
to wr ite about t his installation. A t elevision show titled Art: 21, A rt in the
Twenty-First Century was b roadcast on t he Public Broadcasting S ervice in
the United States and showed videotape of the installation, as w ell as interviews with the artist. These fragments of the work of art may then end up in
a textbook via t he circuitous routes of memory, word of mouth, art review,
and brief catalog description. The few photographs and videotapes of these
events are often embroidered by memory, which transforms the work into
myth, distancing it from the history of the event. A student in an art history
lecture hall is provided with a distilled and perhaps distorted verbal description with a single photograph of an art installation. In one of the earliest accounts of installation art as a category, Julie Reiss advocates careful consideration of historical sources to counteract the transformation of history into
myth. She encourages scholars to critically analyze personal accounts, press
reviews, interviews with artists, and archival evidence, such as photographic
documentation.1
This b ook exa mines wa ys in w hich in stallation a rt, p hotography, a nd
memory are intertwined with one another. Photography has shaped our understanding of history and memory since the nineteenth century. In the last
forty years, a time in which the issue of memory has become of great interest
in art practice and society in general, the theory of photography and photographic practice has become even more important in contemporary art.2 At
the same time, installation art has become one of the ubiquitous, often criticized, mtiers in contemporary art practice.
Ephemeral in stallations t hat a re co ncerned wi th t he p hysical limi ts a nd
material qualities of a si te and interested in t he viewers perceptions would
seem to elude representation through photographs. It is natural to think then
that photographs of these works are both lacking and supplementary to the
work itself. However, most installations are photographed. Amelia Jones notes
INTRODUCTION
that ephemeral art practices, such as body art (and I would add installation
art), require documentation to gain symbolic status.3 As Miwon Kwon notes
of site-specific art, The documentation of the project will t ake on another
life within the art worlds publicity circuit, which will in t urn alert another
institution for another commission.4
One focus of this book then is to analyze discrete examples of photographs
of in stallation a rt in ca talogs a nd b ooks t o demo nstrate ho w t hese ha ve
shaped our understanding of t he work. A s econd focus of t his b ook is t o
examine the different ways contemporary installation artists have used the
installation format, with its similarity to photographic archives, collections,
and e ven cinema spaces, t o exa mine ho w co ntemporary s ociety c ultivates
memory and constructs history. For instance, in Rene G reens installation
Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, there is a ba nk of video monitors, on one of
which we see Green flipping through a book with the photographs of Robert
Smithsons site-specific work Partially Buried Woodshed of 1970. Partially Buried Woodshed was destroyed, and the remains decayed into the earth at Kent
State University decades ago. Therefore, the images in the book are one way
for Green, who was a y oung child when the Woodshed was made , to access
this moment in hist ory. In her w ork Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, Green
avails herself also of the personal memories of herself and others, as well as
artifacts, television reports, and books to uncover a network of associations
and co nnections t hreaded t hrough S mithsons 1970 p iece. In t he p rocess,
Green reveals this moment in history to be a complex of overlapping events,
memories, and experiences that connect her personally to the history of the
year 1970 and to Smithsons woodshed.
The connection to history and memory through photographs and objects
is one of the themes of the site-specific installation Partially Buried in Thre e
Parts. The work is a n archive focused on t his network of connections and
events in t he 1970s. I nstallation a rt a nd p hotography o ften o verlap in t he
practice of archiving and collecting, which has increasingly been used by artists in the questioning of memory and history in contemporary art practice
in the last thirty years. And now, there are numerous installations that question history and memory through collections of photographs, films, videos,
and other objects. As Hal Foster notes, these works are part of an archival
impulse that I b elieve is co nnected to a gr owth of interest in t he issues o f
history and memory in the last few decades of the twentieth century.
Aura and Experience

Cultural critic Walter B enjamins examination of exp erience, memory, and
photography, and art critic Craig Owenss essays on postmodernism, photography, and representation served as the starting point for this project. Benjamins essays from the mid- to late 1930s, including The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, and The
Storyteller, provided basic questions to guide the research. Benjamins essays
describe t he way t hat exp erience has c hanged in mo dernity by examining
how these forms of memory have been conditioned by new technologies, specifically p hotography. In B enjamins a rgument, exp erience has b een f undamentally changed and even degraded in the shift from preindustrial to industrial modes of production. The change is reflected in the duality of memory
that he describes as the decline of aura. The following summary simplifies
Benjamins thinking about memory and aura but will provide the background
for the theoretical issues in this book.
In B enjamins c lassic ess ay, The Work of Ar t in t he Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, he lays out the relationship between the traditional work of
art and its reproduction. An a ir clings to unique, handmade objects bound
toa particular place and time. These objects have lived a history that their
contemporary viewers have not, and they bear the marks of that history in
their material form. Take a centuries-old painting by Rembrandt. It bears the
unique marks of its maker, who laid on brushstrokes in a distinctive manner
to catch the textures of textiles and other things. The paint and canvas bear
evidence of having been made in the seventeenth century. The work is a fragment of a different time and has survived centuries in the possession of various owners before it appears before the curious viewer in t he museum. For
Benjamin, the encounter with this object can be described in terms of aura.
Aura bloomed in the viewers face-to-face encounter with the work of art. If
we designate as aura the associations which, at home in the mmoire involontaire, tend to cluster around the object of a perception, then its analog in the
case of a utilitarian object is the experience which has left traces of the practiced hand.5 In this quotation, Benjamin connects aura to mmoire involontaire, which is t he memory that erupts from the unconscious and engages
the subject in a vivid, bodily recollection of the past. He connects this vivid,
bodily experience of memory with the hand knowledge of the person who
INTRODUCTION
uses a t ool.6 Aura also lends t he work a kind o f presence that resembles in
certain respects the presence attributed to sacred images and figures. In the
encounter with a s acred image, a s ense of distance springs up between the
viewer and the object.
However, the photograph eliminates the aura of the work of art, removing
distance and making it accessible, bringing the work to the masses. Benjamin
aligns the photograph with a different kind of memory, mmoire volontaire. He
offers as a n example of mmoire volontaire the French writer Marcel Prousts
dissatisfaction with his memories of Venice, which he compares to a collection of dry photographs.7 The snapshot produced by the mechanical action
of a ca mera represents the one-touch, instantaneous action of the modern
world that is designed t o accommodate the mass es. The photograph is flat
and thin, reducing experience to a set of visual information locked in a frame.
Memory as photographic reproduction and archival materials, in repressing
certain kinds o f sensuous information, marks the stark divide between the
past and the present, between memory that consists of visual data and memory that engages more of the senses. The transformation of memory practices
generated both excitement and crisis. As Mary Ann Doane writes, in photography a nd film, Time is, in a s ense, ext ernalized, a sur face p henomenon,
which the modern subject must ceaselessly attempt to repossess through its
multifarious representations. The rationalization of time r uptures t he continuum par excellence and generates epistemological and philosophical anxieties exemplified by Henri Bergson, in his ada mant reassertion of temporal
continuity in the concepts of dure.8
Henri Bergson, the early twentieth-century philosopher, had used the relationship of the photograph to lived experience as a met aphor for the way
science describes the vital world. Bergson argues that we experience the natural world as a fluid and shifting continuum. However, modern science has
difficulty grasping the complexity and vital quality of life and tries to break
it down into manageable units. Bergson compares this analytic quality of science t o t he wa y t hat p hotographs a nd films s till a nd fra gment th e vi sual
world.9 He already had an image of this in the work of Eadweard Muybridges
motion studies, which broke the movements of bodies into snapshots.
The American scientist and efficiency expert Frank B. Gilbreth then applied these tools to the study of workers motions and produced films that he
used to render the gestures of people in fac tories and offices more efficient.
F I G U R E I . 1 Eadweard J. Muybridge (18301904), Plat e 44, Walking Taking Off Hat,

Animal Locomotion, 1887, Volume VII, Males and Females Draped and Misc. Subjects,
1885. Collotype on paper, 81/8 in. x 13 1/2 in. (20.64 cm x 34.29 cm). Gift of the Edwin J.
Beinecke Trust, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover Massachusetts, 1984.6.463.
These activities were part of the rationalization of time that Doane describes.
These photographs used in sciences and industry become the model for certain conceptual artists in the 1960s who draw on the direct uninflected treatment of the photograph and the form of the grid in t heir work. The serial
structure of these photographs is taken up as a mo de of presentation in the
work of figures such as Douglas Huebler, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Hollis
Frampton. By the end of the twentieth century, the scientific discourse that
incorporated photographic images as evidence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had become an object of criticism for theorists who ask how
these images produce meaning and have effects in the real world in the context o f s exual a nd racial dis courses. Pho tographs in t his vie w r educe t he
complexity of experience to easily organized categories and bits of visual information, and I will argue that some installations, such as Greens, draw precisely on these photographic practices, structures, and critiques. The problem of the rationalization of time in the early twentieth century is analogous
INTRODUCTION
to the problem of photographing an installation that focuses on the viewers

internal experience of the site. Something is lost, and other aspects of bodily
experience are distorted in the recording.
Installation Art and Experience

The relationship between the authentic work of art and its photographic documentation that Benjamin describes in terms of aura is suggestive when considering the relationship of installation art to photography. Installations often
have a cer tain atmosphere and seek to engage viewers through more of the
senses than vision. Installations are also often specific to the time and place
in w hich t hey are exhibited. All o f t hese qualities sug gest t hat t he components of aura ca n b e f ound in s ome way in co ntemporary in stallation a rt.
Perhaps we can say more accurately that direct or bodily experience takes the
place of aura in contemporary installation art.
The interest in experience in art or experience as art is not new or exclusive
to installation art. It seems to have emerged in t he course of the twentieth
century in discussions of the role of modern art in society. The interest in art
as exp erience p erhaps reflects a h unger for exp erience t hat t he historian
Craig Ireland observes to have emerged in the last decades o f the twentieth
century.10 Even Clement G reenberg wr ites in his 1939 ess ay Avant-Garde
and Kitsch that the reception of modern painting should differ fundamentally from the experience of the everyday object.11 A decade later he suggests
that the all-over painting responds to a sense in modern culture that there is
no longer a hierarchy of values in society and that the ultimate difference is
between the immediate and the un-immediate.12 Modernist painting strived
to achieve immediacy. His protg, Michael Fried, would go on to describe
this distinct, immediate visual experience as the presentness of modernist
painting. For Fried and Greenberg, modernist painting was t he pinnacle of
aesthetic experience, which must be preserved by modern culture.13 In other
realms of art production in the 1960s, there was, by contrast, an emphasis on
art as durational, everyday experience experience outside the museum and
gallery space. The members of the Fluxus movement; those associated with
John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Merce Cunningham; Allan Kaprow;
and the Minimalists advocated art as a si tuation that includes objects, performers, audience, durational time, and perception. These live art practices
of the 1960s, in contrast to the modernist art in museums, were often events
and installations that encouraged viewer participation, everyday temporalities,
and included social interaction. Carrie Lambert-Beatty describes the work of
Yvonne Rainer in these terms. Rainer incorporates everyday gestures into the
structure of her dances to balance two different modes of time: the unstructured contingent intervals of everyday gestures within the formal time period
of the performance.14 And the live event of performance art and body art also
emphasizes the viewer and the performers direct bodily experience.
Installation a rt ca n b e counted as o ne of t hose ep hemeral a rt practices
that emerged in the 1960s. Claire Bishop traces a chronology of installation
from the mid-1960s to the present based on the idea that the viewers direct
experience of the work is one of the defining features of installation art. The
chronology ranges from Allan Kaprows Happenings and Environments to the
social gatherings in the 1990s that Nicolas Bourriaud named relational aesthetics.15 Bishop frames her inquiry by asking what type of experience and
by extension what subjects of this experience are produced by various installation spaces. 16 H er ca tegories co nstitute f our modalities o f exp erience.
One modality derives from the phenomenological subject described in t he
work of philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty posits a subject
fully enmeshed with the space it experiences, so that perceptions of self and
world continually condition each other. Rather than having a stable and certain viewing position, the subject in this modality is continually prompted to
examine a nd r eflect u pon i ts c hanging p erceptions. A ccording t o B ishop,
these spaces address an embodied viewer who is continually made aware of
her or his perceptions. The historical model for this type of work is, of course,
Minimalism. Another category of installation addresses not a sin gle viewer
but the audience as a community, producing viewers that are activated politically. As an early example, Bishop points to Brazilian artist Hlio Oiticicas installation works, which provided tactile experiences of different materials such
as sand, water, and straw. She defines Oiticicas work in these terms in order
to shift relational aesthetics into the realm of installation art, although relational aesthetics also has c lose ties t o performances and Happenings in t he
1960s. These works grouped under the rubric relational aesthetics all require
the active, real-time engagement of participants in a certain time and space.
Because of the interest in face-to-face communication, direct experience,
and active engagement in Bishops criticism of installation, there is an icono-
INTRODUCTION
clastic emphasis that infuses her work, as well as Nicolas Bourriauds. Relational aest hetics is t he t erm t hat B ourriaud co ined t o des cribe w ork t hat
frames not an aesthetic object but rather the interaction among individuals
and objects as designed by an artist. Bishop distinguishes relational antagonism f rom B ourriauds relational aest hetics as a n interaction t hat emphasizes not utopian and inevitably temporary connections among participants
at a T iravanija opening but rather the real world tensions and antagonisms
that are brought out in communities. Despite Bishops criticism of relational
aesthetics, b oth her ide as a nd B ourriauds a re f ounded o n t he no tion t hat
direct face-to-face interaction and experience is better for political and social
systems.17 These works of art downplay the role of photography, as w ell as
present challenges to documentation. In situating relational aesthetics in the
realm of installation art, Bishop suggests that installation art has important
similarities to performance and body art.
Photographs as Memories of Ephemeral Art Practices

The issue of documentation has been explored in body art and performance,
especially in t he work of Amelia J ones. In Joness dis cussions of t he do cumentation of performances, she argues that critics writing on body art have
focused too much on the value of the unmediated presence of the artist in the
work. However, Jones is doubtful that body art is unmediated, and using the
term supplement from Jacques Derrida, she notes not only that the photograph is a su pplement in t he way Derrida defines it but also that there are
many points of deferral of the artists immediate presence in body art. The
sequence of supplements initiated by the body art project the body itself,
the spoken narrative, video, and other visuals in t he piece, the video, film,
photograph, and text documenting it for posterity announces the necessity
of an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations
that produce the sense of the very thing they defer.18
In fact, Jones claims that performance art and its photographic documentation are mutually dependent. She writes, The body art event needs the photograph to confirm its having happened; the photograph needs the body art
event as an ontological anchor of its indexicality.19 The photograph frames
the ephemerality of the event. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, we
seem to b e fascinated by the ephemeral, by things that will dis appear, and
10
there seems to be something poignant and pleasurable in vie wing a p hotograph of a work or an event that one did not witness first hand. Barbara Clausen describes it as a moment that can be desired only in its non-existence.20
She as well as others have suggested that ephemeral art practices need to be
considered not only as specific and discrete events in time but also in terms
of their reception, of which photographs are often an important part.21 The
status of photographs and supplementary documents is also one of the themes
of Martha Buskirks The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, in which she
argues that certain photographs of performances have become iconic to the
point where the viewer, in an art history class, for instance, does not question
the origin and meaning of the image. The image comes to stand for the work
in a wa y t he a rtist ne ver intended.22 Ot hers have als o commented on t his
problem in ephemeral artworks.23 Photographs both solve and create problems when we are trying to understand the past.
This book does not attempt to be a sur vey of the practices of memory in
contemporary art in general.24 The chapters that follow explore how photography and the related media of film and video have helped to shape our understanding of history and memory in t he context of works of installation
art. Many of the works described in this book help viewers to understand the
way photographs and other kinds of recordings have been used to construct
memory and history in t he realm of art practice and beyond. Others try to
resist the flattening effects of photography by producing installation to provoke a bodily memory. Like Joness work, this book too uses Derridas notion
of the supplement and seeks to question the way we read photographs as
documentation no t j ust o f in stallation a rt b ut als o as pa rt o f hist ory a nd
memory.
Site-Specific Art
The writing on postmodern theory and site-specific art that has taken place
in the United States and Europe in t he last t hirty years is im portant in t his
discussion. In this body of art criticism, the photograph as a theoretical object takes a m uch larger role. Ar t historian and critic Craig O wenss work,
inspired by Walter B enjamin, inc ludes p hotography in dis cussions of sitespecific art. For instance, Owens writes about Smithsons work in t he Great
Salt Lake titled Spiral Jetty (1970), which he said included not only the earth-
INTRODUCTION
work b ut als o t he film do cumenting i ts p roduction a nd S mithsons ess ay

titled Spiral Jetty published in Arts of the Environment in 1972. In his articles, Earthwords and The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, Craig Owens draws on the writings of Benjamin to argue that
there is an equivalence between Smithsons site-specific pieces, his writings,
and his photographs of these works in his site/nonsite dialectic. The nonsite,
as wr iting about or photographs of t he site, p oints to t he site, and t he site
points back to the nonsites.25 The work does not stay put but circulates among
the various elements, never wholly present in any of them.
In part 1 of The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, O wens makes t he connection b etween photography and site-specific
art by saying, The site-specific work becomes the emblem of transience, the
ephemerality of all phenomena; it is the memento mori of the twentieth century.26 He then notes that photographs of temporary works of art always seek
to fix the ephemeral. Photographs are supplemental to the work but absolutely
tied to it at the same time. They in a cer tain respect double the work. The
term supplement, as J acques Derrida uses it, however, has tw o senses. Derrida describes the frame of a work of art as outside and supplementary to it,
but it also, he says, marks an absence at the heart of the work. The absence is
indicated by the fact that the work requires some kind of frame. Smithsons
work and to varying degrees other works of site-specific art have this dimension. As Owens notes, the presence of photography in Smithsons notion of
nonsite adds a new dimension to the notion of site-specific art.
In the more recent writing of art historians and theorists Nick Kaye, Miwon
Kwon, and James Meyer, there is an agreement that there is something more
than the type of site-specific art that is built in place, is temporary, and requires the presence of the viewer who experiences it directly. These art historians argue for another type of site-specific art that is characterized as discursive per Kwon, functional in Meyers words,27 and in Kayes writing by
the notion that site is unstable due to the viewers performance in and production of the space.28 According to Kwon,
The work no longer seeks to be a noun/object but a verb/process, provoking the viewers critical (not just physical) acuity regarding the ideological
conditions of that viewing. In this context, the guarantee of a specific relationship between an artwork and its site is not based on a physical permanence
11
12
of that relationship (demanded by Serra, for example), but rather on the

recognition of its unfixed impermanence, to be experienced as an unrepeatable and fleeting situation.29
Among t hese des criptions o f va rieties o f si te-specificity a n in teresting

parallel emerges with the description of memory in the twentieth century
between bodily internal memory, presence, and direct experience, and archival or photograph memory, which makes memory fragmentary, mobile, and
subject to discussion and questioning. Photographic documentation is key to
the mob ility a nd in stability o f si te in S mithsons w ork. The p hotograph as
nonsite is that which renders the site something parallel to language, which
can circulate through publications, galleries, and museums, and be a part of
discourse. Both Meyer and Kwon link t his aspect of site-specificity to photography and to an expansion of the notion of site to include fields of knowledge and inquiry. In this way, memory and history become part of the discourse of site-specificity.30
Memory and History in the Art World of the 1980s and 1990s
Memory was perhaps the epistemological concern of the late twentieth century in t he academic w orld, as ma ny have argued. Artists and curators had
also begun to examine memory in the context of art and culture. The debates
and q uestions a bout memo ry a nd hist ory s eeped in to a rt exhib itions a nd
writings, p erhaps influenced b y t he w ork o f J ean B audrillard in t he b ook
Simulacra and Simulation and that of Fredric Jameson in his a rticle Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in the New Left Review
in 1984. Jamesons piece was subsequently republished as a catalog essay for
an exhibition titled Utopia/Post-Utopia at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art in 1988. In it Jameson worries about the loss of memory.31
Modernism in Fredric Jamesons characterization is the time of grand narratives that propel the modern subject through a coherent sense of development and progress. In postmodernism, Jameson claims time is subordinated
to space and memory disappears.32 At any rate, from this nostalgic and regressive perspective that of the older modern and its temporalities what
is mourned is t he memory of deep memory, what is enac ted is a nost algia
INTRODUCTION
for nostalgia, for the grand older extinct question of origin and telos, of deep
time and Freudian Unconscious . . . and for the dialectic also.33
Jameson links t his materialization of time t o t he decline of mo dernism,
and in fac t, he wr ites about these issues in t he context of that essay on the
exhibition of installations at t he Institute of C ontemporary Ar t in B oston.
There is a link b etween the sense of the decline of modernism, installation,
and now materialized memory. The sense of depth provided by history, memory, a nd e ven, as J ameson a rgues, t he unco nscious a re emptied a nd made
thin in his description of postmodern space. This space is where postmodern
subjects lose their sense of historical orientation and any ability for community or collectivity.34
For Baudrillard, the age of simulacra produced rather than reflected reality. In a desp erate s cramble to recover memory, w hatever remained of t he
past was preserved in what he perceived to be a museum culture. The same
holds true at Cruesot, at the level of the open museum where one museumified in situ, as historical witnesses of their period, entire working-class
neighborhoods, li ving met allurgic zo nes, a n en tire c ulture, men, w omen,
and children included gestures, languages, customs fossilized alive as in a
snap shot. The museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is
everynow, like a dimension of life.35
Baudrillards ide as w ere influential in t he N ew York a rt co mmunity in
1983 and 1984. Artists, such as Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Philip Taaffe,
all painters in the Neo-geo movement, as well as commodity artists such as
Haim S teinbach a nd J eff K oons, r egarded t hese ide as as cr itical endo rsement.36 Neo-geo, with its smooth, machine-tooled paint surfaces and cool,
hard-edge abstract forms, and Koonss vacuums and Steinbachs digital clocks
with their hard, shiny, plastic surfaces were claimed as perfect examples of art
as simulacrum. Others perceived the work of the Neo-expressionist painters
of the 1980s and even the work of Sherrie Levine to be linked to his ideas.37
Critics, such as Thomas Lawson also noted a revival of previous avant-garde
movements in Neo-surrealism and Neo-pop, and the re-creations of Judson
Dance theater performances, Happenings, and Fluxus events.38
In many critics perceptions of the art world in the early 1980s, there was a
general sense that art movements and avant-garde gestures art history
were simply being recycled, with retro fashion and nostalgia extending across
13
14
the realm of pop culture. Thomas Lawson associates the sense of repetition
with a completion of the hegemony of American power. He writes in Artforum
in 1984, This linear belief system has begun to fade, its practicality replaced
by a more effectively repressive concept of progress as eternal return, the cyclic time of myth in which culture no longer evolves but simply revolves. In
this post-Modern world, history is no longer a tool of self-identification, and
ultimately of autonomy, but is instead merely an instant commodity.39 Lawson describes the situation of the continuous present in terms of both a lack
of creativity and an inability to conceive of a f uture. Ot her cr itics, such as
John Howell and Lisa Liebmann, regarded the return to history as a wa y to
digest t he innovations of t he past a nd t o engage in a p layful s ort of decadence. Kate Linker describes the culture in terms very similar to Baudrillard
and Jameson.40
In terms of art, this resurrection of history took the form of dehistoricizing
art historical styles and practices such as Exp ressionism, Dada, Surrealism,
and turning them into signs to be used at will in making a work of art. Critics
and artists at this period nevertheless seem to be unable to decide w hether
the phenomenon of repetition is a form of market-driven cynicism or simply
nostalgia.41 As Hal Foster observed, these appropriations could be either a
form o f c ynicism o r a n a pt f orm o f cr iticality f or t he time .42 It co uld b e,
aswell, that this is a f orm of working through traumatic events the rapid
changes of the twentieth century. History or art history, if not memory, becomes a p roblem for artists to work on in t he late 1970s a nd 1980s. 43 It i s
because of photography and other recording media that artists were able to
remake no table p erformances, us e imag es f rom hist orical w orks o f a rt in
their work, or appropriate historical images and outmoded fashion.
An exhibition organized around this perception of memory was The Art of
Memory: The Loss of History at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in
1985.44 The artists included Judith Barry, Adrian Piper, Louise Lawler, Martha Rosler, Ren Santos, Troy Brauntuch, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The writers
for t he exhib ition, William Ola nder, Abigail S olomon-Godeau, a nd D avid
Deitcher, are concerned about the commodification and reification of memory in the form of mass media images. This process of reification, they argue,
results in a loss o f history, or the suppression of alternative historical discourses, as w ell as t he loss o f indi vidual co ntrol o ver memo ry i tself. The
photograph is perceived in this exhibition, therefore, as an ambivalent criti-
INTRODUCTION
cal tool.45 It can be used to support dominant power structures or to undercut t hem. The ess ayists c haracterize memory in t he 1980s as f ragmentary.
William Olander goes so far as to assert that this fragmentary memory is one
of the chief preoccupations of art in postmodernism.
Most of the artists who made w ork for the exhibition drew their images
specifically from the mass media. M artha Roslers video in stallation Global
Taste used television advertisements taken from around the globe. Richard
Prince re-photographed scenes of leisure from magazines, and Christopher
Williamss site-specific photo installation On New York ii combined a media
image o f a n ex ecution in B angladesh, p erformed f or t he ca meras, wi th a
stock tourist image of New York City. The artists in the exhibition also made
histories f rom t hese co llections o f imag es t hat under cut o fficial histories,
such as Sa rah Cha rlesworths dtournement o f a mo nth o f t he Herald Tribune. In this project, she removed all of the text and left only the masthead
and photographs of a mo nth of t he ne wspaper. Bruce B arbers RememberingVietnam combined an advertisement/tribute by United Technologies to
the soldiers of Vietnam with a des cription of a wa r crime from an official
government investigation. Finally, Hiroshi Sugimoto exhibited photographs
of natural history museum displays and empty theaters, while Louise Lawler
showed photographs of a storage room at the Rude Museum in Dijon, emphasizing the artificiality of the museum effect. The exhibition displayed memory
as representation, and the artists critiqued the social codes in images.
Whereas the work in t hat exhibition centered on the loss o f immediac y,
presence, and connection in memory through photography and video, Places
with a Past arranged in Charleston in 1991, was organized around the notion
of t he immedia te p resence o f hist ory a nd memo ry. The c urators o f Places
with a Past invited artists to come to Charleston and create site-specific works
that engaged t he history of t he place. A wide ra nge of artists participated,
such as Ann Hamilton, Christian Boltanski, Chris Burden, Cindy Sherman,
Lorna Simpson, Alva Rogers, and David Hammons.
In her catalog publication, Mary Jane Jacob emphasizes the idea that the
works created used narrative in order to recover repressed or marginalized
histories.46 The artists were expected to deal with some aspect of Charlestons hist ory. Most of t he pieces w ere constructed in hist oric b uildings in
downtown Charleston and drew on t he atmosphere inherent in t hese old
buildings.
15
16
The memory evoked in these works is body-oriented memory that utilizes

the hist oric sheen o f a ci ty lik e Cha rleston. M iwon Kwon a rgues t hat t his
exhibition neutralized the critical capabilities of site-specific work:
While site-specific art continues to be described as a refutation of originality
and authenticity as intrinsic qualities of the art object or the artist, this
resistance facilitates the translation and relocation of these qualities from
theartwork to the place of its presentation, only to have them return to the
artwork now that it has become integral to the site. . . . Conversely, if the social,
historical, and geographical specificity of Charleston offered artists a unique
opportunity to create unrepeatable works (and by extension, an unrepeatable
exhibition), then the programmatic implementation of site-specific art in
exhibitions like Places with a Past ultimately utilize art to promote Charleston
as a unique place.47
Kwons critique suggests that memory can easily become a typ e of commodity that bolsters rather than critiques the system into which it is placed.
The exhibition Doubletake at Londons Hayward Gallery in 1992 t ook the
theme of collective memory. Lynne Cooke wrote a chapter titled The Site of
Memory in which she observed in the early 1980s an interest within popular
culture a nd li terature in t he ide a o f a fa bricated memo ry t hat p roduced a
convincing type of authenticity. She used the example of the film Blade Runner, in w hich one of the main characters, a g enetically engineered clone, is
convinced that she is h uman because of the vivid memories that have been
implanted in her brain.48
Cooke observed that a distinction exists between organic, genuine memory and artificial memory in Philip K. Dicks original novel. The distinction
does not exist, however, in William Gibsons cyberpunk fiction of the same
period. Ci ting H oward S ingerman, C ooke a rgued t hat co llective memo ry
now has effectively b een t aken over by mass c ultural material and mediaproduced memory, which has colonized private memory.49
Memory a nd mo urning sur faced in a rtwork in t he late 1980s a nd e arly
1990s in the context of aids a s well. In 1994, Simon Watney writes that, for
a community that was experiencing an overwhelming number of aidsdeaths,
the questions of seeing and remembering take on a very special significance
in relation to aids. 50 Douglas Crimp argues in Mourning and Militancy
that, because the gay community had b een so discouraged from mourning
INTRODUCTION
and, in fac t, enco uraged t o hide t he de vastation o f aids f rom the greater
public, mourning was in fact a type of militancy.51 Because many artists had
experienced aids o n such a personal level, they found that the appropriate
response was in t he form of intimate photo diaries of friends illnesses and
deaths, aids p ortraits, a nd indi vidual s culptural memo rials.52 A different
response was the public action posters, such as were shown in the exhibition
On the Road: Art against aids . The traveling show included posters designed
by artists such as B arbara Kruger, Gran Fury, and Cindy Sherman. The annual Day without Art, organized by the group Visual aids, and founded by
curator Thomas Sokolowski, curator Gary Garrels, critic Robert Atkins, and
curator William Olander, began in 1989.53 The organizers requested that arts
organizations close one day a year in memory of aids v ictims. At the same
time, Group Materials aids t imeline was published in various art publications and s erved b oth as a memo rial and wa ke-up c all fora public and
government determined to ignore the urgency of the aids crisis. Other aids
memorials, such as the names quilt, and various other activities such as vigils and personal memorials, also served as embodiments of memory and loss.
Two more books on art and memory need t o be acknowledged before I
describe the structure of the current book. Lisa Saltzmans Making Memory
Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art discusses the work of
several contemporary artists who use various strategies for memorializing.54
Saltzman organizes the work she discusses around various forms of indexes
that have b een made f or centuries in a rt. Taking as her st arting p oint t he
legend of t he C orinthian maiden w ho traced t he shadow silhouette of her
departing lo ver o n a wall , Sal tzman f ocuses o n co ntemporary v ersions o f
shadows (i.e., video projections), silhouettes, and casts. Saltzman argues that
contemporary art in many ways employs the strategy of the index as absence
to bear witness to atrocities and everyday life alike.
Joan Gibbonss Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and
Remembrance ca tegorizes va rious w orks o f co ntemporary a rt via different
ways of remembering. These range from personal remembrance or autobiography to postmemory those who contend with events that took place before they were born and to archives and museum collections as memory.
Both Saltzman and Gibbons acknowledge one of the premises of this book,
which is t hat memo ry a nd hist ory ha ve b ecome significant t hemes in a rt
since the 1970s.
17
18
Installation Art as Heterotopia

Installations provide a space t o think critically about contemporary experience. For the book Installation Art in the New Millennium, the authors engaged Jonathan Crary to write the preface. In it he claims, Aesthetic debates
dependent on notions of medium are out of touch with contemporary actuality.55 Installation, for Crary, is not directed so much to the development
ofaesthetic experience as it is a response to an epistemological crisis. Previous to the late nineteenth century, Crary claims, a balance existed between
the human sensorium and the conditions of perception. However, with the
transfer of vision, hearing, memory, and thinking to machines, the human
faculties of perception were overwhelmed by the bewildering amount of new
information available. Crary claims that installation is important because it
provides a means to cope with the immense changes in perceptual conditions
in the late twentieth century, by testing and presenting new means of experience. Memory w ork in co ntemporary a rt de als, p erhaps, wi th t he o verwhelming transformations of contemporary society. I will take up both these
arguments with regard to installation art. Installation art provides a wa y of
coming to grip with the changes in the present but also a means to reflect on
the past.
Michel Foucault describes the materialization of memory via his notion of
genealogy.56 In genealogy, memory settles into material, resting in the document, the statement as spoken, written, or remembered.57 It clings to the surfaces of bodies, materials, and objects. Thus, in Foucaults writing of the 1960s,
memory is materialized, fragmented, and dispersed. For Foucault the sense
of history as progressive had faded as w ell. Therefore, in the era of material
memory it is necessary to map sites. His discussion of mapping sites and the
establishment of relations among sites is r eminiscent of Rob ert Smithsons
discussion of both geological time and site/nonsite. Foucault writes, Site is
defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we
can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. . . . The storage of data
in the memory of a mac hine; the circulation of discrete elements within a
random output (car traffic, the sounds on a t elephone line); t he identity of
marked or coded elements inside a set may be randomly distributed, or may
be arranged according to single or multiple classifications.58
INTRODUCTION
Within these sites there are relations that can be figured, Foucault writes,
in visual terms. By performing this type of mapping, Foucault is able to distinguish between quotidian sites and those he calls heterotopias. Heterotopias are sites marked off from society that paradoxically connect to all other
sites in s ociety. They open out as w ell onto other times. F oucault names as
examples the library, the museum, the cemetery, and the cinema. Thes e are
all spaces that are connected to the materialization of memory.
Installations can be described as a nother form of heterotopia, a p lace set
off from society where different times and places intersect via objects, materials, and images. Installation seems to be a particularly appropriate practice
for artists interested in memory and history because it can take on the form
of these structures that are charged with keeping memory and history: the
archive, t he library, t he museum collection, and e ven t he st age and movie
theater.
The technologies of vision, such as film and photography, provided a way
to ma terialize time .59 Ar t p ractice p rovides a space in w hich t o r eflect on
these technologies and the way we construct history and memory. Ther e are
at least two important dimensions of the relationship of photography to installation art. For temporary installations, the photograph is o ften the only
thing left of the work. The ideal viewer would see the piece in p erson and
have a direct, bodily or phenomenological experience of the site. When regarded in t his manner, the photograph is a su pplement to the installation,
and it is read as if it were a visual document. The photograph may not be the
ideal way to preserve a bodily experience, and it raises additional questions
about how time is materialized in the photograph.
The second dimension focuses more on the photograph as something that
frames a part of the visual world and makes it mobile, allowing it to be recontextualized, to become discursive. In the context of installation art, the photograph is investigated as a mediator of history and experience. Because it is
a representation, it is already inscribed and shot through with meanings invested in it by its cultural context and the understandings carried by its viewers. The materiality of the photograph is an advantage in this kind of critical
historical practice, as it seizes and holds time, disrupting its flow and making
it possible to analyze it. Cutting the continuous flow of time and freezing it
inobject or photograph form, materializing it, enables this reconsideration
19
20
of history. Benjamin had argued that the uncertain nature of meaning in the
photograph unsettles viewers until they are provided with a ca ption. It is
the unsettled quality of the photograph that enables the rereading of it and,
by extension, the rewriting of history.
The Structure of This Book

This book discusses two dimensions of the relationship between installation
art and photography. First is the notion that photographs of installation have
shaped our memories and conditioned the histories written about these works.
Second, some of the works in this book encourage us to consider how photography produces effects of memory and is us ed to construct histories via t he
installations of archives, photographic images, and objects. And d uring the
passing of analog photography, the book encourages viewers to realize that
photographs, film, and video a re historical objects whose effects and status
should be questioned.
This books four chapters track a rough chronology, beginning in the late
1970s. The first two chapters deal with the archives of specific works of installation art. In the first chapter, that archive consists of a group of catalogs of
exhibitions devoted to installation art in the 1970s. The chapter begins with
a look at the role of photography in the exhibition catalog for Rooms at PS1
in Queens, New York, in 1976. Rooms invited artists to take the literal site of
the exhibition as inspiration for the content of the work and resulted in many
site-specific pieces that exist now only as pictures. The chapter considers the
documentation of the work in t he exhibition, the form of the catalog, and
what work was included in the show as well as the works that were picked up
in reviews. Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the participants in the exhibition.
The role of his photographs of his own building cuts presents another twist
tothe issue of documentation. Chapter 1 examines Matta-Clarks artist book
Splitting, focusing on the way his collages play with photographic space and
their relationship to the bodily experience of his site-specific piece Splitting
from 1973 t o 1974. This chapter concludes with a dis cussion of an exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 t hat included the work of Adrian Piper, Cindy
Sherman, Louise Lawler, and Christopher DArcangelo. Janelle Reiring, who
later went on to co-found the gallery Metro Pictures helped organize the exhibition. It was her intention to present the work of artists who thought con-
INTRODUCTION
sciously a bout t he wa y t heir p hotographs a nd in stallations w ere a rranged

and the way that viewers would see and read the work as a result. The work
in t his exhib ition p oints t o t he a rt in stitution as a kind o f f rame b ut als o
causes viewers to reflect on their own habits of viewing and interpreting art.
The catalog had f ew photographs; instead, language takes the place of photography in this exhibition.
In the second chapter, the archive is the Rene Green installation Partially
Buried in Thre e Parts. Greens work examines her connection to Robert Smithsons Partially Buried Woodshed and engages with the way a work of art has
been represented in its documentation and the memories of those who saw
it. The piece goes beyond that to examine the myriad connections between
personal memory, social history, political idealism, and the global art world.
This chapter focuses on t he films and installation ass ociated with Partially
Buried in Thr ee Parts. Special interest is paid to Greens fascination with outmoded recording and presentation technologies such as film projectors and
slide shows. Greens work also demonstrates her interest in the way systems
of information produce categories and meanings. The photograph is a serial,
infinitely reproducible object and is a modern means of organizing and communicating information. She plays with the serial nature of the photograph
in order to encourage viewers to question how the framing of images and
of information shapes our understanding of it. Viewers become critical readers in her installations and other archive-type installations.
The last tw o chapters focus on bodily memory in in stallation art, that is,
how artists use objects and materials to evoke sensuous memories. Photographs of these installations are problematic because they dont capture the
complexity of the work. However, photographs and films in in stallations in
the era of digital media, as historical objects, have become a spark for bodily
memory.
The third chapter examines a recent work by Ann Hamilton, a prolific installation artist who has made mo numental atmospheric installations comprised o f o rganic ma terials, s ound r ecordings, mec hanical elemen ts, a nd
videos since t he 1980s. H amilton is in terested in p erception and t he b ody
and considers t he vie wers exp erience of primary importance in her w ork.
Her installations mostly appear to the greatest number of interested viewers,
however, in t he form of beautifully composed, richly colored photographs.
Photographs of Hamiltons work, as well as other installations that focus on
21
22
the vie wers b odily or phenomenological exp erience, raise questions about
the relationship between experience and image. What is lost when an installation is reduced to a p hotograph? Chapter 3 exa mines this question in t he
context of her 2001 in stallation the picture is still, which I was able to see in
Japan. This chapter also looks at Hamiltons series of photographs called face
to face, which I argue is a way of infusing bodily experience into the photographic image. These are pinhole photographic portraits that Hamilton made
using her mouth as a kind of camera. Hamiltons work and others focused on
perception seek to provide a way for viewers to engage in a reflection on experience and memory grounded in the body and senses.
The final chapter examines video and film installation and the use of sound
in installation art at a moment when analog film and photography is becoming outmoded. Each of the artists addressed in this chapter made projected
films or video installations that reflect on how the film projector and image
preserved and shaped memory. The recent film installation by t he British
artist Tacita Dean titled Kodak, the video Headphones incorporating found
footage by artist Tony Cokes, and the film installation Situation Leading to a
Story by Matthew Buckingham raise different questions about the relationship b etween images and exp erience in t he context of c hanging recording
technologies. Chapter 4 will examine these artists interest in how photography a nd film a nd s ound r ecording ha ve b een inco rporated as pa rt o f t he
practice of memory in the twentieth century.
Installation is not a medium but a multimedia practice. I argue that, from
the late 1970s to the present, photography has come to pervade the practice
of installation and become the unacknowledged foundation of this now ubiquitous mtier. The installations in this book bear a relationship to the photographic archive. This book examines the different ways that photography and
installation art reinforce, enrich, and contradict each other. Each chapter explores different ways that photography is involved in memory in the context
of installation art, examining not only what is lost in the photographic documentation of installation art but also how, in t he context of installation art,
photography and memory produce new sorts of narratives and histories.
ONE
expanding the frame

I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T I N T H E
1 9 7 0S
Installation Art and Modernist Painting

Most museums and galleries are designed to show masterpieces; objects made
andplanned elsewhere for exhibition in relatively neutral spaces. But many artists
todaydo not make self-contained masterpieces; they do not want to and do not
try to. Nor are they for the most part interested in neutral spaces. Rather, their work
includes the space its in; embraces it, uses it. Viewing space becomes not frame but
material. And that makes it hard to exhibit.
Alanna Heiss on the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976
In the late 1960s, major art institutions in the United States had only recently
and with a great deal of trepidation brought the new practices of installation
and site-specific art within t heir walls. S imultaneously, t here was a g lut of
artists who wanted places to exhibit and who, as Alanna Heiss asserts, were
making work that challenged the conventions of the traditional art galler y.
With the support of government funds, new exhibition spaces run by artists
began to sprout all o ver New York City and other cities across t he United
States. These new spaces exhibited time-based, ephemeral art practices such
as video , p erformance, a nd in stallation a rt.1 These ne w f orms o f a rt a nd
types of exhibition practices led a rtists and critics to question the values of
the traditional art gallery devoted to exhibitions of modernist painting and
sculpture.
This c hapter exp lores t hree exa mples o f in stallation a rt in t he 1970s in
New York that challenged these traditional art gallery practices. Thes e projects include the exhibition Rooms at PS1 in 1976, Gordon Matta-Clarks piece
24
Splitting from 1973 to 1974, and an exhibition at Artists Space in 1978 of the
work of Adrian Piper, Chr istopher DArcangelo, L ouise L awler, and Cindy
Sherman. Using the idea of the frame as a pivot point, this chapter examines
the ways these projects broke the conventions of the modernist art galler y.
Two different dimen sions of f raming a re exa mined. Taking t he now commonplace notion that the exhibition space is a kind of frame for artwork, the
chapter asks ho w these examples of installation art broke the frame and
challenged t he str ictures of mo dernist art exhibition conventions. S econd,
because for the most pa rt only the photographs and the texts that describe
them survive these pieces, these projects will be examined via exhibition catalogs in an effort to understand how this type of representation conditions the
historical understanding of these exhibitions.
Because of its ephemeral and motley character, installation, in contrast to
painting, has b een marginalized in wr iting on the history of contemporary
art. Its marginalization parallels that of the modernist movements of Surrealism and Dada in the history of 1960s Greenbergian modernism, which is
based on abstract painting.2 As artists and critics had come to realize by the
end o f t he 1960s, mo dernist a rt, pa inting in pa rticular, r equired a cer tain
kind of setting in o rder to achieve the sense of its aesthetic autonomy and
visual purity. The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually
sealed off. . . . Unshadowed, white, clean, artificial, the space is de voted to
the technology of est hetics. Works of art are mounted, hung, s cattered for
study. Their ungrubby surfaces are untouched by time and its vicissitudes. . . .
The space offers the thought that while eyes and minds are welcome, spaceoccupying bodies are not or are tolerated only as kinesthetic mannequins
for further study.3
This is a n o ft-quoted pa ragraph f rom t he tr io o f a rticles t hat a rtist a nd
critic Brian ODoherty (aka P atrick Ireland) wrote in t he mid-1970s a bout
the conventional mo dernist art galler y. As an artist w ho was exhib iting in
alternative art spaces in New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s and as the
director o f f unding f or t he visual a rts f or t he National Endowment o f t he
Arts, ODoherty had a n in terest in t he wa y a rt was exhib ited. ODoherty
argued that the modernist gallery continued to serve as a kind o f frame for
the work that contained it and, along with a certain decorum for the viewer,
dictated ho w t he a rt was t o b e s een. M odernist pa inting is made f or t he
eyesalone. Installation breaks the traditional frame of art, as exemplified by
E X PA N D I N G T H E F R A M E
painting, and often engages more than the visual sense. ODoherty regarded
installation-type practices, therefore, as a r upture within the historical category of modernist sculpture and painting.
It is useful to get a sense of how the modernist art gallery was viewed in the
early 1970s by summarizing ODohertys arguments from Inside the White
Cube. ODoherty began his exa mination of the conventions of framing in
the modernist institution by describing how paintings have been displayed.
The first article gave a brief history of the hanging of paintings since the eighteenth century, making clear how the white gallery wall b ecame more and
more important over t he co urse o f t he tw entieth century. Thes e developments, he argued, had to do with the ways in which the painting frame and
the space within the frame changed with the development of modernism.
He points to a painting from 183133 by Samuel F. B. Morse of the interior
of the Louvre in which paintings are hung in the typical salon style, crowded
on the wall from floor to ceiling. In this setup, the space of the gallery wall is
divided hierarchically, but other than that it is irrelevant to the paintings that
are placed on it. It is irrelevant because each painting is a self-contained universe. With an illusionistic sense of space created by whatever optical devices
the painter might employ, such as sin gle-point perspective or atmospheric
perspective, these paintings become spaces that open up to the viewer and
ask to be explored by the eyes.
In these images, the frame is nothing more than a boundary marker. But
once the flat surface of an image becomes a fac tor, ODoherty argues, the
frame takes on greater weight and places pressure on the surrounding wall.
The relationship b etween mo dernist aest hetics a nd t he f rame as a f ormal
device is more complicated. In modernist painting, the edge of the painting
and the frame that formalizes it become a kind of problem. If the edge of the
painting is emphasized, then the wall of the gallery becomes a factor in the
display of the work. It was p hotography, ODoherty argues, that sensitized
viewers to the edges of images. In the photograph, the frame is an integral
part of the work.
Installation art has b een associated with the dissolution of the frame of
painting and, by extension, the expansion of art into nonaesthetic realms,
asAlanna Heisss statement above implies. In the late 1960s a nd 1970s, as
ODohertys wr iting indica tes, t he co nditions t hat w ere q uestioned w ere
those that dictated the exhibition of modernist painting. The challenge took
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a variety of forms. If the white cube modernist art gallery, which displays
painting, ex cludes t he pass age o f time , t hen in stallation w ould b ring time
into t he galler y space.4 If t he mo dernist galler y excludes t he b ody and focuses on the eye, then installation is oriented to the body.5 If the gallery alienates spectators or viewers from their experience, then installation needs t o
bring viewers and experience into the work of art.6 By using modernism as a
foil, ODoherty is a ble to historicize the exhibition space a nd, in s o doing,
both define the practice of installation and derive its genealogy. In its liberation f rom the mo dernist painting ideology and aesthetics, the wall o f the
white cube is punctured and the outside world is allowed in. The frame of the
work of art is provisional and shifting in the practices that challenged modernist painting.
Jacques Derrida asks continually in his discussion of the parergon, What
is inside and what is outside the frame? If the frame defines in some way the
actual work, how does it do so? He concludes that not only is the parergon a
supplement to the work but also it is the internal structural link which rivets
them to the lack in the interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of the ergon.7 It is the lack that defines the work (ergon)
and that calls for the parergon as a supplement. I propose that, if the frame of
installation art is in some way external and held by the institution that shelters
and sponsors, it is also internal. Installation always points to the conditions
that frame it, and because those conditions vary among the different kinds of
sites and institutions, installation also points to its mercurial identity.
The examples chosen in this chapter reflect different ways of dealing with
installation as a kind of frame. John C. Welchman argues that, in the 1970s,
the period of each of the exhibitions discussed in this chapter, interest shifted
from the frame as a literal object or limit to what Welchman calls the metaframe o r s econd f rame o f t he in stitutional co ntext.8 Rob ert Morris a rgues
that the newer work of the 1970s expands the frame to include not only the
work but also the space in which it is placed and the relationship of the viewer
to the work and to the space.
Most o ften, in r ecent in stallation a rt, t he a rt in stitution has s erved as a
kind of de fac to frame or limit. Even the art institution as a li teral frame of
four walls is not necessary. It is the sanction of the art institution, as Martha
Buskirk has sho wn, t hat is r equired. The in stitution p rovides t he gr ound
against which the installation becomes a form: There is always a form on a
ground, but the parergon is a form which has as its traditional determination
not that it stands out but that it disappears, buries itself, effaces itself, melts
away at the moment it deploys its greatest energy.9 And this parergon or institutional frame can take the form of a photograph in an exhibition catalog.
Given this, another dimension of installation art can be gleaned from examining the role of photography in the work. Documentary photographs of the
work are usually seen as supplementary to the actual work of installation art.
Photographs of installations, especially those that have appeared in exhibition
catalogs, are one of the things by which installation art is framed and given
symbolic status, as Amelia Jones says.
Artists have already been thinking about the relationship photography has
to their installation pieces. Because installation artists are often interested in
engaging the body and the senses, one common attitude to the photograph
regards the image as insufficient in relation to the experience of the work. For
these artists, the photograph is marked by loss a loss that can be signified
in a variety of ways: as a sense of the passage of time, in terms of the limitations of the visual sense, in terms of the flatness and discreteness of the image,
or the silence of the image. Bodily experience, in this outlook, always exceeds
the frame of the photograph. In addition, photography has b een examined
with skepticism in poststructuralist texts because it is a visual medium that
is rooted in Western notions of rationality and objectivity. Installation, in this
sense, can be seen as a critique of the primacy of vision in Western art. Artists
who are interested in this dimension of installation art have, therefore, carefully considered how their works are documented.
Installation, even as it lacks an essence and demands a frame, also internalizes t hat f rame, p ointing t o t he co nditions t hat f rame i t a nd q uestioning
them. This b ook exa mines va rious asp ects o f t his t ension b etween p hotographic documentation and direct experience of installation art. We will also
examine ho w a rtists ha ve inco rporated p hotography in to t he co ntent a nd
structure of t heir in stallations, t aking ad vantage of t he p hotographs air of
objectivity and rationality, and its ability to map and articulate spaces, to render the visual w orld meaningful, and to produce its own orders of rational
organization, time, memory, history, and knowledge.
PS1 and Rooms

In 1976, the PS1 arts space opened its present location in Queens, New York,
in a neig hborhood t hat co mmentators des cribed as f ull o f ac tive fac tories
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and warehouses.10 The PS1 building was a disused nineteenth-century school

with tw o win gs a nd t hree floors p lus a n a ttic a nd accessib le r oof. W hen
the Institute f or Ar t a nd Urban Res ources, r un b y Ala nna Heiss, le arned
thatthebuilding was slated for demolition, they negotiated a lease with the
city of Queens for one thousand dollars per year for twenty years. The Institute, founded in 1971 under Heisss leadership, took a mission to find abandoned spaces t hat could b e renovated and us ed for exhibition and studio
space for artists.11 The Institute intended the old building to house artists
studios that could be rented cheaply, project spaces where artists could develop and exhibit long-term projects, exhibition spaces, and a performance
space. PS1 was t o b e a n a rts center t hat co uld acco mmodate t he ne w a rt
of the 1970s, w hich i ts su pporters a rgued r equired exhib ition spaces t hat
could be altered and messed up by the art that was often produced in and
displayed in t hem. Martin Beck notes that such broken-down spaces w ere
accepted as pa rt of the aesthetic of post-Minimalist art in t he mid- t o late
1970s.
The inaugural exhibition Rooms at PS1 in Queen s was intended to showcase t he way such a ne w space co uld f unction. According to Artforum re viewer Nancy Foote, the exhibition was thrown together in a matter of months
but managed to include t he work of ne w and well-known artists f rom t he
East Coast and West Coast of the United States, as well as Europe. Ther e were
seventy-eight participating artists who chose among different spaces in t he
old s chool building, including classrooms, corridors, attic, roof, bas ement,
coal bin, and playground. Because the building was only modestly refurbished
to house the new arts center, it was the raw, crumbling walls and warped and
debris-strewn floors that inspired the exhibition. Ar tists were asked to use
the building for work that was built in place and responded to the material
qualities of the structure.
Nancy Foote in Artforum and Ros alind K rauss in October we re t wo re viewers of the exhibition in ma jor publications at the time. Foote used the
terms project and gesture to describe the work in the Rooms exhibition,
which suggests the influence of Brian ODoherty who had published two of
his three articles on the white cube the previous spring in the same magazine. The final one would appear in the next issue of Artforum. Foote tends to
focus on the best-known artists in the show, such as Joseph Kosuth, Gordon
Matta-Clark, Richard Serra, Suzanne Harris, Carl Andre, and others. How-
ever, Foote discusses more artists than Krauss and emphasizes that the ways
in which the seventy-eight artists used the building differed.12
Foote discerned a category including artists who focused on the surfaces
of the old school building and made them part of the content of the art; she
included Lucio Pozzis panel paintings, Michelle Stuarts wall-rubbings, and
Frank Gillettes photographs of various walls, corners, and other surfaces of
the school. In another category of artists who used windows, Foote mentions
Daniel Buren, who covered windows in the auditorium with stripes, and Doug
Wheeler, who altered windows with coverings of darkened plastic that transformed day into night. In another category of artists who used the structure
and materials of the building itself for their work, she included Matta-Clark,
David Rabinowitch, and Jene Highstene. Rabinowitchs piece in the secondfloor corridors cleared paint off large areas of the wall and then made circles in
the plaster.13 Highstenes sculpture used the floorboards from the classroom
where he chose to exhibit the work. In this piece, he used the boards as part
of a chicken-wire structure for a large mound covered in black concrete.
Although Foote included a gr eater variety of artists than Krauss, she ignored those who used the rooms in the building as empty spaces for sculptural scenes, as in Ned Smyths re-creation of the Last Supper in the attic, or
those who used the space to hang pictures, photographs, and drawings, such
as Howardena Pindells set of framed video stills titled Video Drawings. Thes e
dont seem to fit into the themes of site-specific abstract art that the review
promotes. However, it is fa ir to say that these are different ways of dealing
with the space of PS1. So, Footes categories are useful in that they provide a
sense of the variety of work in the exhibition, but they are also rather narrow
in that they describe actions taken in relation to the physical structure of the
building. Ano ther s et o f ca tegories co uld b e cr eated bas ed o n ho w a rtists
considered issues of framing and emphasis.
Framing the Interactions between Artwork,

Exhibition Space, andViewer
It is helpful to develop a new set of categories in the Rooms exhibition based
on a field of relationships between viewer, artwork, and space.14 Thes e relationships delineate situations produced in momentary interactions between
the work, exhibition/cultural context, and viewer.
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B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T WO R K : D E N N I S O P P E N H E I M A N D CO L E T T E
These categories spring from the variations among the mutual relationships
between artwork, viewer, and space. One ca tegory would include those installations in which the space acts as a frame for the relationship between the
work and the viewer. These include installations that used the rooms at PS1
as empty spaces to fill with objects. In these works, the exhibition space (the
walls, ceilin g, a nd floor) b ecomes a kind o f f rame t hat m ust dis appear in
favor of what it frames.
For instance, Dennis Oppenheims piece is a type of theatrical tableau in a
room on the second floor of the building. Called Broken Record Blues, it is
ascene of two dolls, one of which faces the corner of the room in a chair like
a c hild s ent t o t he co rner while t he o ther lies facedo wn o n t he floor. A
mark on the floor connects the two. In Colettes Davids Wrai th, located in the
attic, viewers pass through a corridor to find themselves in a room hung with
silk and satin where in one corner a performer is tucked in an alcove of the
room. The performer reclines dramatically like the French historical figure
Marat in Jacques-Louis Davids 1789 painting Death of Marat. In these installations, the walls and floor of the space, generalized and subordinated to the
theatrical scene, serve as a setting. And while these works invite the viewer to
complete the narrative of which the scene is a part, they do not point to the
specific qualities of the building in any direct way.
B E T W E E N A R T W O R K A N D E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E : S E R R A A N D R Y M A N
Part of the Rooms exhibition were installations in which the relationship between the work and the space becomes the focus and in which the difference
between the work and the space is so fine as to be indistinguishable. In these,
the relationship of the work to the viewer is deem phasized. Artists such as
Richard Serra used the surfaces of the space as a type of ground for a physical
action. Ric hard S erras un titled p iece was lo cated in a n a ttic space wi th a
steep, pitched roof. In this work, Serra cut a trench through a concrete floor
and then sunk two steel beams in it, creating a dark diagonal line as it moved
across the floor. One beam faced hollow side up and formed a trough, while
the other had a solid side up and was positioned flush with the floor. As Richard Tuttle remarked, it was difficult to tell whether Serra was taking advantage of an existing structure in the space or if he cut a new channel, as the line
FIGURE
1 . 1 R obert Ryman, untitled from Rooms exhibition, PS1, 1976. 2011 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York.
of the trough extended from a channel in the wall to the spot where the roof
beam met the floor.15 Serra blurred the distinction between the work and its
physical context.
Another piece similar to Serras in its subtlety was Robert Rymans untitled
work located in a small , dark room on the first floor of the new wing that
looked out on t he inner co urtyard. Ryman us ed its windows to illuminate
two small , pale s quares o n t he wall . I n t he p hotograph r eproduced in t he
catalog, t he tw o s quares, o ut o f line wi th e ach o ther, g low in t he lig ht o f
the windo ws. The a rtist r emoved a ny extra neous pa int f rom t he wall a nd
adhered tw o p ieces o f pa per co vered wi th w hite wa tercolor t o t he wall s
surface.
Serras and Rymans work frames the relationship between the work and
the space. As site-specific postminimal work, it is far more difficult to articu-
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late the limit of each of the elements (work and exhibition space) in that relationship, and both would have been destroyed at the end of the exhibition.
A R T W O R K A S D O U B L E O F E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E :
L U C I O P O Z Z I A N D M I C H E L L E S T UA R T
There were installations in w hich the relationship between work and space
was so tenuous that the work doubled some aspect of the space. This category
of work is described by Krauss in Notes on the Index. In part 2, she focuses
on two of the seventy-eight artists in Rooms whose work exemplifies the notion of indexicality that she puts forth: Lucio Pozzi and Michelle Stuart. Pozzi
placed paintings of various sizes in different areas along the corridors of the
first floor. D epending o n t he dir ection t hat a visi tor t urned, t he pa intings
could have been some of the first things that one saw when entering the exhibition. Pozzis paintings, as Krauss discusses at length, were two-toned abstractions whose dividing lines and colors matched those of the old, peeling
paint in the corridor. Michelle Stuarts drawings, which were rubbings of the
wall and wainscoting hung on the wall opposite the site from which they were
taken, were located in a corridor on the second floor.
B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T W O R K / E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E :
PAT R I C K I R E L A N D A N D G O R D O N M AT TA - C L A R K
Another category inc ludes in stallations t hat en gage t he vie wers c hanging
experiences of space as they walk around a room. Patrick Ireland (aka Brian
ODoherty) and Gordon Matta-Clark explored the way space can be experienced as either two or three dimensional. Ireland participated in the exhibition with an installation/drawing that dealt with embodied seeing and perspective. Irelands Rope Drawing No. 19 was lo cated in r oom 201 in t he old
wing of PS1 down the hall from Matta-Clarks work. In an emptied classroom
with its chalkboards intact, Ireland hung a series of ropes from the ceiling by
threads and attached them to the floor. From a distance, they would appear
as white lines drawn from the floor toward the ceiling, standing out as figures
against t he gr ound o f p eeling walls a nd d usty c halkboards. I n her r eview,
Foote describes moving through the space and watching the lines coales ce
and s catter as she t ook different p ositions. Ireland us ed t he format of t he
magic square, arranging the ropes in a 25 b y 25 square on the floor, cutting
FIGURE
1 . 2 G ordon Matta-Clark, Doors, Floors, Doors from Rooms exhibition, PS1, 1976.
2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
34
the ropes into various lengths and placing them in rows that in any direction
also added up to 25 feet. It is interesting to think how this work responds to
the artists writing on the frame and the exhibition space in his trio of articles
on the white cube, as he makes a piece that in effect has no frame but maintains the important visual distinction of figure and ground and single-point
perspective dependent upon the viewers moving body.
Gordon Matta-Clarks work also changes in terms of the viewers perspective and gains significance as an image. He took rooms 109, 209, a nd 309,
which were located in a corner of the old wing of the school, facing the inner
courtyard. He cut a piece that echoes the size and shape of the doors of each
classroom out of the floors in front of the doorways of each classroom. And
in each cut, the artist preserved the floor joists. The photograph published in
the subsequent catalog suggests that the piece was playing with the notion of
mirror reflections, as the shape of the cuts rhymes the doors. The photograph
is taken from close to the ceiling and looking straight down into the cuts. It
is hard to discern the separate cuts as they recede from the camera. And in
this way, they resemble the reflections in facing mirrors, which become difficult to distinguish as they recede in the mirror.
Both Irelands and Matta-Clarks work focuses on t he visual in terplay of
three- and two-dimensional space. Their pieces changed as the perspective the
viewer took of them changed. They made the building a presence by framing
it but also focused on the viewers body in the space. And the photographs of
the work further elaborate these issues.
B E T W E E N V I E W E R A N D A R T W O R K / E X H I B I T I O N S PA C E :
MARY MISS AND SUZANNE HARRIS
Another category of framing would include those installations in which the

work and the space involve the viewers bodily experience of the space. Thes e
installations use structural features of the building to guide vie wers awareness o f t heir b ody a nd p erceptions wi thin t he space . S uzanne H arris a nd
Mary Miss made works of this sort. Harriss Peace for the Temporal Highway,
a room-sized piece that functions as a framing and scale device, was built as
a tunnel-like structure of cardboard whose roof descended from the rooms
ceiling at a sha rp angle and whose walls als o narrowed as t hey approached
the windows of the room. Viewers entered the room and found themselves
in the dark space o f the structure whose opening framed the radiator un-
derneath the windows. Ira Joel Haber and Sue Weil described being in and
around the structure in t erms of being large inside the structure and small
outside it.16
In a large room overlooking the inner courtyard on the third floor, Mary
Miss installed a sim ple wooden corridor that drew on the viewers sense of
perspective and her own bodys scale in relation to the work. Sapping positioned the viewer to look from its entrance down its length. Judging from the
photograph reproduced in the catalog, the viewer entered the classroom and
had to walk around the structure in order to enter or see into the corridor.
In this way, the work positioned the viewer and created a point of view. Artist
Howardena Pindell describes it this way: One feels, walking around and into
Sapping, as if one has been edged into a symbolic dimension as Gulliver or a
Lilliputian.17 In each of these pieces, rather than being generalized, as in the
theatrical works described above, the relationship between the viewers bodies and the peculiar features of the room were called into play. In this sense,
the installation framed that dynamic, momentary encounter.
The Rooms Exhibition and Photography

Although t his s et o f categories do es no t exhaust t he w orks t hat w ere p resented in the show, it does give a sense of the variety of works included in the
exhibition a nd t hat w ere o verlooked in t he co ntemporary r eviews. I n t his
brief sur vey of Rooms, there is a dic hotomy between site-specific and sited
installations that lend themselves to photographic documentation and those
that elude photography. Some of these works, such as Op penheims, can be
photographed without compromising the work, while in Harriss and Misss
works, something is lost in the photograph that must be made up with firsthand descriptions. Like the minimal object, these pieces depend on the more
unpredictable element of the viewers body and perception. Matta-Clark and
Patrick Irelands too depend on the viewers body, but the works reference
pictorial formats. These are present-tense works of art.
Mary Ann Doane, in analyzing the work of photographers, philosophers,
and psychoanalysts in t he b eginning of t he twentieth century argues t hat
there was a sense in the twentieth century that it was impossible to grasp the
present mo ment as i t ha ppened b ecause o f t he limi tations o f t he b ody.18
There is a lag b etween physical stimulus and the brains p erception of the
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stimulus. Pho tography a nd film a ttempt t o ca pture t he p resent mo ment,

which eludes human perception. She writes,
But it is finally in the new representational technologies of vision photography,
the cinema that one witnesses the insistency of the impossible desire to
represent to archive the present.19
The longing to grasp the present is only partially solved by the photograph.
It is photographys indexicality that makes it seem to offer presentness. But
even the photograph, which fixed a mo ment of time, always represents the
past. In the photographs of the experiential installations of Mary Miss and
Suzanne Harris, the impossible desire to represent the present is c learest.
The photographs do not capture what the work is about.
Doane argues that modernity is characterized by the ephemeral, the chance
moment. She describes this as the contingent and notes that it is a form of
resistance to the rationalizing systems of time that developed in the last centuries. Chance represents a rupture with the rational organization of time in
industrialized modernity. Its lure is t hat of resistance itself resistance to
system, to structure, to meaning. Contingency proffers to the subject the appearance of absolute freedom, immediacy, directness.20 Something similar
seems to take place with installations that focus on experience and perception. They offer the possibility of chance encounters in the bodily experience
of the space. It is in t he failure to fulfill this desire to hold on to the contingent, to the present moment in its fullness, that the archival impulse emerges.
Rosalind Krausss two articles published in October in 1977 a re canonical
essays in t he literature of postmodernism. Her agenda in t hese articles was
first to establish a connection to Marcel Duchamp in art practices after modernist painting and, second, to undercut the critical assertion by modernist
critics that modernist abstract painting was a straightforward presentation of
painting materials rather than a typ e of representation. She is o nly tangentially or perhaps not at all interested in installation art as such; it is a pretext
for her a rgument. However, the argument Krauss makes about the work in
Rooms illuminates some of the connections between installation and photography that this book seeks to describe. Krauss describes the relationship between site-specific art and photography in terms of the index. She begins her
discussion with the linguistic term the shifter, which indicates a word that
gains its particular meaning by its circumstances.21 She goes on to connect
the shifter to the notion of an index: In so far as their meaning depends on

the existential presence of a given speaker . . . the pronouns announce themselves as belonging to . . . the index.22 An index is the physical trace of something having been present, such as a footprint or a photograph that points at
something no longer present.
However, photographs also seem to bring absent referents a kind of presence because of their nature as indexes. The light recorded in the photograph
is reflected from the object that is photographed, creating a direct, physical
connection. The photograph as index r epresents a limi t the closest t hat
one can get to a moment as it happens. In photography for the first time, an
aesthetic o r spa tial r epresentation co uld b e made b y c hance, b y acciden t,
without human control. And it would still be a sign o f something, perched
precariously on the threshold of semiosis. As the sign most clearly connected
to the present and presence, perhaps it is the ideal limit of the instant that is
approached by the index.23
Doane distinguishes between two kinds of indices. One is t he indexical
trace the fingerprint, the photograph, which always indicates a pastness
and the other is the deictic index: the signifiers here, now, this, that are
inextricable from the idea of presence.24 The index hovers between presentness a nd pastness. The f rame a nd t he p hotograph ha ve simila r p ositions.
They point to something in the here and now but, in doing so, make it past,
absent, or elsewhere. At this point in the argument, it is p ossible to pull in
the thread of Derridas discussion of the parergon and to connect it to the
photographs r elationship t o in stallation. One w ishes to go b ack from t he
supplement to the source: one must recognize that there is a supplement at
the s ource.25 The instantaneous photograph approaches presence, t he f ullness of a lived moment, but never quite achieves it and therefore points to a
lack or absence at the heart of what it frames.
Krauss argues that, in the Rooms exhibition, the ambition of the works is
to capture the presence of the building to find strategies to force it to surface
in the field of the work.26 Krauss suggests as well that it is impossible to experience the fullness of presence in these works. She argues that, even as the
presence of the building surfaces within the frames made by artists such as
Matta-Clark, t he f ramed material is filled with an incredible s ense of time
past: the paradox of being physically present but temporally remote.27 The
representation, even as it resembles the original, points (as an index) always
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to the action of something in the past. The framing that takes place in these
works, whether painting, drawing, or photograph, that bring the materiality
of the building to the viewers attention also suggests absence because they
point t o a n ac tion t hat t ook p lace in t he past. The p hotographic a rchive
emerges as a solution to the impossibility of grasping presence in site-specific
installation art.
Photographs are at the same time co ntingent. A ca mera can be pointed
inany direction; anything can fill the photographic frame. The photograph is
replete wi th det ail, w hich mak es i t difficult t o de velop a sp ecific meaning
from a photograph.28 Mary Ann Doane describes this as giving the spectator
nothing to read.29 Photographs therefore demand a caption, as Walter Benjamin noted, or an order that produces meaning. The silence of the solitary
image leads to a desire to see the photograph of the moment before and the
moment after in order to discover a meaning. A single photograph naturally
leads to a series, which demands an order.
John Baldessaris Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting It Straight),
which appeared in the Rooms exhibition, is a wonderful example of this desire to produce order and meaning from contingency. It is a s eries put together by c hoosing a line ar element in p hotographs o f va rious dis astrous
situations: (hurricanes, floods, explosions, landslides, drought, etc.). Thes e
lines are then drawn on the photograph and aligned with a line produced by
the wainscoting or dado o f the wall. Basically, an attempt to find a st eady,
straight, continuous line in a s ea of muddledness, writes Baldessari.30 The
line is a wa y o f p roducing o rder a nd me aning f rom co ntingency. Pho tographic series, sequences, narratives, and archival orders result from this desire to fill in absence, to make something meaningful from photographs.
Catalog as Narrative and Archive

We can turn now to one narrative, one photographic archive gathered for
the Rooms exhibition: the catalog. The designers of the exhibition catalog for
Rooms conceived of it as a kind o f walk t hrough the exhibition space wi th
each page representing a different room. In this way, the exhibition catalog
mirrors the exhibition space. The catalog and exhibition begin with a group
photograph of all the participants and organizers of the exhibition and a shot
of the exterior of the Romanesque Revival buildings faade rising above the
streetlights and a ne arby Amoco gas st ation. Photographs of the entrances
tothe old school building, the more modest of which is labeled Girls, follow these. The doors are an invitation to turn the page and visually enter the
building. Waiting on the other side are not clean and renovated spaces but
images o f t he c lassrooms b efore t hey had b een c leaned u p f or t he sho w.
Floorboards are torn up and resting in corners. Paint peels from the wall, and
old desks and chalkboards await removal. These pages represent what greeted
the artists as they began to make their work.
The next f ew pages show artists working in e ach of their spaces. I n one,
John Baldessari leans against the wall of a corridor, bearded chin in hand, as
he contemplates a series of photographs on the wall. In the next pages, we see
people working on Jennifer B artletts piece, hanging up her ena mel plates;
Matta-Clark tearing up floorboards; and Jene Highstene regarding a chickenwire and board structure covered with black concrete. These action shots are
intended to demonstrate how PS1 differs from the traditional art gallery and
museum space, which artists are not permitted to mess up, by giving us a
sense of how an artist goes through the process of making a work. They also
suggest that the process of production and the site were to the work in Rooms
as important as the final work itself.
The layout of the catalog is an attempt to solve the problem of representing
the exp erience of a b ody moving t hrough t he space o f t he exhibition. The
catalog uses the turning of pages to suggest movement from one room to the
next. But the designers chose to give not just a diachronic sense of the layout
but also a synchronic one with a nod to later art historians who would be interested in understanding the arrangement of the show. For each floor there
is a list o f participating artists along with the number of the room in which
their work was exhibited and a ground plan showing the relative size of each
space and its location in the building. In this way, the reader gets a sense of
how the show was divided up and arranged.
It is the exhibition space that provides the ground for the narrative to unfold, while the photographs map that unfolding, and in this process, the space
of installation becomes an articulated space that must be read. Nancy Foote
speaks to this in her r eview as w ell. She argues that the arrangement of the
show contributed to the content of the theme in w hich context becomes a
39
40
kind of content. In the catalog and photographic documentation of the work,

the space is laid out for the viewer, but there is also movement through time
at different scales. In the individual photograph we have a sense of the temporal and temporary quality of the work due to the nature of the photograph,
which records a moment in time, but also a sense of movement through the
space of the exhibition as one turns the pages.
Foote makes the claim that each installation in t he exhibition influenced
the view of the next installation and that, because of this, an overall aesthetic
issue became clearer: Installations and projects are rarely called upon to socialize, since they usually have the place to themselves. . . . But as one picked
ones wa y t hrough t he r ubble f rom p iece t o p iece, s omething o f t he s ame
phenomenon began to occur. Installation itself, not individual projects, became the esthetic issue.31 The issue that Foote describes can be stated as How
does one make an installation? and when one considers this question, installation becomes a defined art form, such as sculpture and painting, rather
than one that responds to its site. In focusing on this dimension of the show,
the building recedes from our consideration of the work. Despite the emphasis on the old building and its qualities as a space for showing art, it remained
relatively neutral as a frame for the art.
The photographs of these pieces and the catalog do two things in relation
to the work in the exhibition. First, they map the space of the exhibition. This
mapping made it possible for me to develop the categories of work that are
outlined in the preceding paragraphs. Second, the sequence of photographs
on s eparate pag es p rovides a na rrative t hread t hrough t he sho w, w hich
mimics a visi tors walk t hrough the space o f the PS1 b uilding. The catalog
acknowledges time as pa rt of t he w orks in t he show, as a n element of t he
work or in the ephemeral nature of many of the pieces, which in turn situates
the exhibition as pa rt of t he genre of process art and site-specific art. The
catalog demonstrates to the potential audiences at PS1 no t only the quality
and expanse of the exhibition space but also its curatorial mission. As Alanna
Heiss noted, PS1 was started to nurture the new art practices that did not fit
comfortably in t he mo re est ablished m useums in t he New York a rea. The
exhibition and the production of the catalog have secured Rooms place in the
art institution and in art history. The photographs and the catalog itself serve
as an archive for the show, giving it symbolic value, and rendering it an object
of art historical classification and study.
Breaking the Frame: Gordon Matta-Clarks Splitting

I like very much the idea of breaking frames the same way I cut up buildings. I like
theidea that the sacred photo framing process is equally violatable. And I think
thatspartly a carry over from the way I deal with structures to the way that I deal with
photography. That kind of rigid, very academic, literary convention about photography,
which doesnt interest me. Oh, its not that it really doesnt interest me. Its that I find
that for what I do, its necessary to break away from it.
Gordon Matta-Clark, Gordon Matta-Clark: Works and Collected Writings
Gordon Matta-Clarks work bridges the division between installations or sited

works preoccupied with the viewers bodily experience and installations that
can be photographed. Matta-Clarks work can be considered a study of frames
in installation art and in photography. Commentators, such as artist Joseph Kosuth, regarded Matta-Clarks photographs as extraneous to his larger body of
work, but Matta-Clark himself was aware that site-specific installation is bound
to the photographic medium. Photographs, like Matta-Clarks building cuts, engage the issues of the representation of space, the passage of time, and the production of history. This was an important aspect of Matta-Clarks work, and he
seemed fascinated by different ways one can explore a space: by a moving perceiving body and with the eyes alone in photographs. The photo collages that
he published in his artists book Splitting go beyond the Rooms catalog in exploring the differences between space explored by the embodied eye and space explored by the camera. Matta-Clarks photographs also reflect an interest in time
and rates of transformation, experienced by the body and the environment.
In a general sense, Matta-Clarks work outlines some of the primary concerns of site-specific installation art. Not only do his b uilding c uts s eek to
grasp the exhibition space as a co mprehensive object or situation, but they
also make t he vie wer s ensitive to t he alterations in t hat space. Installation
brings the structure of the exhibition space in as o ne of the elements in the
work, but even more, it positions the viewer as an active perceiving agent.
Recognizing the importance of documentation in his work, he tried various photographic solutions to the problem from deadpan black-and-white
snapshot do cumentation t o large-scale Cibac hromes t hat s erved as visual
interpretations of the bodily experience of his spaces. 32 He was interested in
photography both as a self-sustaining process generated by a reaction to light
41
42
and as s omething that recorded his ep hemeral site-specific work. Thes e interests are present in his work from its beginning.
Matta-Clark graduated from Cornell University with a degree in architecture in 1968 but stayed on in Ithaca, New York, before moving back to New
York City. His first photo-documented site-specific piece was Rope Bridge
of1968, where he strung ropes woven like a cats cradle over a dramatically
deep gorge in Ithaca. In the photograph, the thin tracery of rope is drawn like
a delicate line across the surface of the image as a snowbound and icy waterfall cascades in the background. Shortly after he made t his piece, he helped
with the Earth Art exhibition organized by Willoughby Sharp that included
the work of artists such as Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson. As has
been remarked by Pamela Lee and others, Robert Smithsons work was an important influence on Matta-Clarks work. For the exhibition, Smithson made
works that compared mirrors to photographs, by placing large, square mirrors and photos in the landscape around Ithaca and then re-photographing
them. These pieces, related to Smithsons mir ror displacements, connected
photography directly to sited works. As Matta-Clark was em barking on his
career as a n artist, the question of the status of representations and documentation of site-specific work was very much in the air. Smithsons work, as
Craig O wens w ould la ter wr ite, b roke wi th t he co nventions o f mo dernist
presentness by insisting that representation in the form of photographs and
language be at the heart of his piece.
Matta-Clark, too, was in terested in est ablishing a b reak with modernism
in his own work. There is in Matta-Clarks opinions and work already a critique of the scientific and rational aspects of modernity as represented by his
rejection of the modernist ideology and principles being taught by his professors at the School of Architecture at Cornell University. As the art historian L ee has demo nstrated, his w ork was in dialog wi th b ut als o r ejected
many conventions and values of modernist architecture, including its faith
in modernist utopian ideas of progress. He was sk eptical of the notion that
life can be improved by following principles of rational design.33 In reaction
against these ideas, Matta-Clark was fascinated with natural and organic processes of growth and decay, and the possibility of an architecture based on
reuse rather than the new.
Part of Matta-Clarks response to modernism was a critical examination of
the function of frames: from the frame of the cultural institution to the frame
of the image. ODoherty and Matta-Clark share the opinion that the frame of
the work of art is s omething that not only confines but also defines and reveals new information to the viewer. Matta-Clarks photographs explore the
formal and conceptual complexity of framing. And his work bridges the literalness of the frame in modernism and the ideological dimensions of framing that would come to preoccupy postmodernist critique.
ODoherty argues that the frame is more than a formal device and regards
it as a metaphor for the confining formalism of 1960s modernism, which he
connects to an almost p uritanical denial o f t he vie wers b ody. In t his disavowal of the body, a disembodied eye is elevated. ODoherty argues against
the h ygienic c leanliness o f t he white c ube in fa vor o f s omething w here
time, dir t, a nd, most o f all , t he vie wers b ody as a b ody is allo wed access.
ODoherty associates the sullying of the modernist art gallery with a collage
aesthetic that can be traced to Surrealism and Kurt Schwitterss Merzbau. By
inviting in processes of time, dirtying, and decay as part of his work, MattaClarks site-specific installation art broke with the conventions of modernism
as well. The fascination with organic processes and decay was a b reak with
modernist no tions o f sim plicity, c larity, a nd visuali ty in a rchitecture a nd
painting. He objected to modernist architectures emphasis on innovation by
describing it as hygienic and antihistorical.
I am experimenting with alternative uses of space that are most familiar. I
liketo think of these works as by-passing questions of imaginative design by
suggesting ways of rethinking what is already there. I do not want to create a
totally new supportive field of vision, of cognition. I want to reuse the old one,
the existing framework of thought and sight. I am altering the existing units
ofperception normally employed to discern the wholeness of a thing. It is
anorganic response to what already has been well done. More than a call for
preservation, this work reacts against a hygienic obsession in the name of
redevelopment which sweeps away what little there is of an American past, to
be cleansed by pavement and parking. What might have been a richly layered
underground is being excavated for deeper new building foundations.34
Greenbergian mo dernisms ele vation o f visio n as t he su preme aest hetic

sense has its roots in Western traditions in which vision is connected to reason and knowledge.35 Single-point perspective assumes t hat light travels in
straight lines and that vision is determined by specific geometric principles,
43
44
namely, the visual pyramid or angle whose apex ends at the viewers eye but
that also sweeps out a view of a space that seems consistent and measurable.
The image that renders an illusionistic three-dimensional space a nd can be
mapped out appears to be a visual a nalog to the space in w hich the viewer
stands.36 In this type of visual space, the image directs where a viewer should
stand in order to see it correctly. In such a space, too, the viewer can ignore the
frame that encloses it, even as t he frame is part of the geometric space t hat
renders the image comprehensible and measurable. Many theorists have connected single-point perspective and the space it renders with certain kinds of
Western ideologies, such as the notion of a centered, rational subject for whom
the visual space is rendered an object of study and knowledge.37 The space of
vision rendered by the photograph is connected to this one-point perspective
developed in painting space in early modern Europe but also differs from it as
well. The photographic process is charged with authority because it imitates
the way t hat vision works, w here lig ht traveling in stra ight lines falls o n a
photosensitive surface. And photographic images, like the process of vision,
are produced in whole at once without the need for human intervention. According to the art historian David Summers, Photography imitates vision as
a physical process, on the assumption that it is aphysical process, and the analogy inherent in this imitation implies that vision and photography are events
of th e sa me ki nd.38 Pho tography is t hen co nnected t o t he dis courses o f
knowledge based on vision and rationality in Western traditions.
Furthermore, the photograph suggests that any event can be framed, captured, and rendered part of a discourse of knowledge. When a frame encloses
an imag e space t hat is o rganized acco rding t o sin gle-point p erspective, i t
produces a viewer space where the image is made in such a way that it acknowledges the viewer that looks at it.39 The space shown within the frame
continues beyond the frame, as in a la ndscape, but cannot be seen by the
viewer because the frame provides a limit. What is enclosed by this space is
arbitrary and is no t dep endent on architecture within the image. It is as if
what is enclosed in this space is cut from a larger view.40 The camera can be
pointed in any direction to frame an arbitrary portion of the field of vision.
Photography acknowledges contingency. What is taken is a f ragment of the
visual field that nevertheless always has a cer tain relationship to the viewer
who is positioned upright and facing the image. Cameras are able to provide
images of spaces that appear to be the type of space that the viewer can enter,
a consistent three-dimensional space subject to the same forces as the viewers

space but that are in fact spaces the viewer can enter only with the eyes.
The camera and photographic image seem to render the world open and
available, if not to the human body then at least to the eye of a body standing
still, upright, and facing forward. However, it always falls short, as Amelia
Jones notes. Matta-Clark acknowledged that a viewers perception always exceeds that of a camera, and hence, the photograph was inadequate to record
the experience of a body moving through a space.
I started out with an attempt to use multiple images to try and capture the
all-around experience of the piece. It is an approximation of this kind of
ambulatory getting to know what the space is about. Basically it is a way of
passing through the space. One passes through in a number of ways; one can
pass through by just moving your head; or [by] simple eye movements which
defy the camera. You know its very easy to trick a camera, to outdo a camera.
With the eyes peripheral field of vision, any slight movement of the head
would give us more information than the camera ever had.41
To understand t he dilemma t hat Matta-Clark faced in do cumenting his

site-specific pieces and exhibiting the photographs in a gallery, it may be useful to consider Henri Bergsons ideas about the vitality of bodily perception
and experience. In Bergsons epistemology described in his 1911 b ook Creative Evolution, a division occurs between the continuous and vital experience,
and the fragmentary and dispersed images produced by modern science and
technology. Bergson argues that continuity and flux characterize the natural
world and our experience of it. Modern science, however, has difficulty grasping the complexity of the perpetual differentiation and vitality of life and
tries to break it down into units. In Bergsons characterization, the scientific
approach to perception is modeled on photography and film. Consciousness
takes snapshots of the perpetual movement and, based on these frozen instants,
establishes ideas about form, essence, and laws of change. A v isual analogy
for Bergsons description is Eadweard Muybridges motion studies of the 1880s.
These images of men, w omen, and animals moving through spaces o r performing athletic maneuvers provide the scientist or artist with not only the
opportunity to study the position and gestures of a body as it occupies space
at any instant in time b ut als o, with each successive image, a s ense of that
body as it moves in time.
45
46
These imag es o f t he na tural w orld ob tain t he ill usion o f co ntinuity b y

being linked, either placed side by side or, in film, run through a projector
that gives the illusion of continuous movement. In Bergsons description of
perception as des cribed by science of the early twentieth century, one moment follows another, like the frames of a film. 42 Bergson writes, We may
therefore sum u p what we have been saying . . . that the mechanism of our
ordinary knowledge is o f a ci nematographical kind.43 In Bergsons analogy,
time and experience, vital and fluid, decay into spatialized units in scientific
perception something material, dispersed, and rationalized. Experience as
captured by scientific, modern technology for Bergson is drained and empty.
Photography and film provided him with the figures necessary to articulate
the characteristics of the natural world as captured and measured by science.
In this analogy, we already see photography being cast as a negation or a reduction of vitality or life.
If t he p hotograph ca n b e co nsidered a n in strument o f mo dernist discourses of knowledge, science, and rationalism, as Bergson suggests, it can
also historically be considered part of the discourse of natural philosophy
and alchemy. Matta-Clark was als o interested in t hese ideas; he t hought of
photography in t erms of growth, development, and decay. In 1969, he had
moved to New York and began combining the chemical processes of cooking
and p hotography w hen he made a s eries o f p ieces f or a n exhib ition ti tled
Documentations at the John Gibson Gallery in which he fried photographs
in the gallery. At the end of the year, he sent out boxes with small, fried Polaroid sna pshots coa ted in g old le af t hat dep icted a Chr istmas tr ee.44 In
drawing the Polaroid photograph into the realm of stovetop cooking, MattaClarks w ork r ecalls t hat p hotography b egan as a mateur exp eriments t hat
considered the process of capturing one of many natural processes that were
being discovered and exploited in t he nineteenth century. The result of the
photographic experiment was a n object that combined science and nature.
Mary Warner Marien in her c ultural history of photography notes two perceptions of photography in its early days that support or reinforce the notion
of t he photograph as a fragment of nature.45 The first is t he nineteenthcentury perception of the photograph as not the result of a mechanical technique but rather a natural process that has been captured by the apparatus
of p hotography. S he q uotes L ouis-Jacques M and D aguerre w ho ass erted,
The Daguerreotype is no t an instrument which serves to draw nature; but
a chemical a nd p hysical p rocess w hich gi ves her t he p ower t o r eproduce

herself.46
Marien no tes t hat t his p erception o f t he p hotograph em phasized i ts
spontaneity the magical appearance of the image on the negative and its
accuracy. These traits gave the photograph the merit of natural genius, Marien
argues. In other words, it is something that is not achieved through painstaking craft or an artifice but rather wells up out of the natural world itself. The
photograph obtained its connotations of innocence, objectivity, and universality from these perceptions. At the same time, because it is produced by a
sophisticated mechanical technique, the photograph was als o perceived to
be a s cientific object. Matta-Clarks cooked Polaroids recall the earliest experiments in photography, which were as much a co oking experiment with
exotic chemicals and natural processes as a nything else. Nicphore Nipce,
who p roduced t he first successf ul p ermanent p hotograph, exp erimented
with bitumen of Judea, derived from oil, oil of lavender, silver chloride, and
iodine. Daguerre developed and perfected the process that ended by developing the image with mercury fumes.
Matta-Clarks experiments with agar, a gelatinous, nutritious environment
for laboratory bac teria, als o sug gest a fas cination with subst ances t hat develop and decay when placed in the light. In 1969, Matta-Clark began a series
of pieces made f rom agar, sperm oil, vegetable and animal substances, and
other materials that were mixed up into metal pans and placed in the air to
become cultures for bacteria and mold. The interaction of the microscopic
organisms and natural substances soon produced exotic colors and shapes.47
In some of these, he placed a drop of mercury, perhaps as a reference to those
earlier p hotographic exp eriments. M atta-Clark inc luded t hese p ieces in a
work titled Museum at the Bykert Galler y in N ew York in 1970. Thes e unusual works of art and chemistry caught the attention of the gallerist Holly
Solomon w ho b ought s ome o f t he p ieces a nd hung t hem u p in her ho me
where they continued to change. After a while they became fragile and began
to deteriorate.48
Matta-Clark soon made a nother flammable version of the agar pieces in
which he dried and then burned the substance. He called these pieces Incendiary Wafers, and they were dangerous objects to exhibit or even have around.
But they too hearken back to the dangerous production of plastics in the early
days. Substances, such as celluloid, used in filmmaking, involved cooking up
47
48
the chemicals and running the plastic through machines to produce film in
factories where water dripped from the ceilings in order to prevent the random fires that would spring up.49
In each of Matta-Clarks organic-chemical pieces, as in these photographic
processes, organic and chemical elements are catalyzed by the application of
light and heat. And although these pieces involve the process of development
and growth, they also incorporate the process of decay, as do es the photograph. The Incendiary Wafers are literally used up and destroyed as they fill
out their lives as artworks. Within a few months, Matta-Clark would be observing t he s ame process with t he cherry tree t hat he p lanted in t he dark
basement of 112 G reene Street and kept alive for three months with artificiallight. When it died, Matta-Clark commemorated the life and death of the
tree by taking its remains and burying them under a sla b of concrete in the
basement.
In these pieces and in his la ter building works that involve photography,
arcs o f de velopment, deca y, a nd dis appearance a re ma pped o ut a t va rious
scales, some quick, as in Incendiary Wafers, and some that have lasted centuries as in his building cuts in seventeenth-century townhouses in Paris, titled
Conical Intersect. By setting up these processes or by doing the work of cutting through the walls of buildings that will soon be destroyed, Matta-Clark
is placing a kind of narrative frame or developmental frame around a process
that takes place within a certain space and time. These processes involved not
only the establishment of a form, the growth of a material, but also its decline
and rot, which Matta-Clark seemed to regard as essential to acknowledge in
the artwork.50
Site-Specific Art and Frames

In Matta-Clarks treatment of his cut buildings, there is an acknowledgment
of the object-like quality of the structure, its immediacy as a work and as an
opportunity to examine b odily exp erience in t he present moment.51 Ho wever, the work always guides the viewers attention to the development of the
site and the artwork over time. In this way, there is a synchronic dimension
to t he work, in w hich t he material and str uctural asp ects of t he space are
highlighted a nd p ut f orth f or in spection. H owever, t here is al ways a diachronic dimension that is highlighted in the work, an acknowledgment that
processes of development and decay in time take place at many levels.52 In

this way, Matta-Clarks work resembles that of other site-specific artists, such
as Robert Smithson. Smithsons work acknowledges that entropy will inevitably act on the site of the work. And Smithson conceived the documentation
of the site and even language in the form of essays to be part of the original
site-specific work.53
Matta-Clarks dynamic of site and photograph clarifies one asp ect of his
site-specific installation art: photographs of installations, as do in stallations
themselves, ac knowledge t he dimen sions o f space a nd time and time a t
many different scales. In his still photography, there is an acknowledgment of
the same synchronic and diachronic dimensions. The photographs sweep out
the visual space of the architectural intervention, but they are also part of the
diachronic dimension of the work. The photographs acknowledge the duration of the process of making the work, as well as its destruction.
The act of cutting through from one space to another produces a certain
complexity involving depth perception. Aspects of stratification interest me
more than the unexpected views which are generated by the removals not
the surface but the thin edge, the severed surface that reveals the autobiographical process of its making. There is a kind of complexity which comes
from taking an otherwise completely normal, conventional, albeit anonymous
situation and redefining it, retranslating it into overlapping and multiple
readings, conditions of past and present.54
In the quotation above, Matta-Clark invites the viewer to think about the
issue of framing, representation, and display. The wall, Matta-Clark argued,
and t he edg e produced by t he c ut not only produced a sha pe but als o revealed a process of making both the making of the wall and the production
of the cut. This suggests that Matta-Clark was thinking of his work in terms
of labor both the labor of those who erected those buildings and his own
when they were cut. The photographs of Splitting as well as the film acknowledge this aspect of labor.
In des cribing his w ork as r evealing t he p rocess o f makin g, Matta-Clark
implies that somehow this process of production has been hidden in the final
product. His statement points to another way that the piece of wall is framed
and that is in terms of cutting. In Marxs description of industrial production,
the product is a result of not a work process but rather specialized systems of
49
50
work that are unified only in the commodity. In a similar fashion, in the commodity, the traces of labor time a re erased or illegible.55 In making the cut,
what Matta-Clark revealed is a p rocess of production and the effect of the
passage of time in the static and permanent structure of the building. Ther e
are multiple time scales being exposed in Matta-Clarks work: the process of
producing the structure, the effect of time and weather on the structure, and
the process of making the cut. The final work and the photographs document
the physical labor and time that was required to cut through the wall.
The Artists Book Splitting as Time Frame and Archive

Matta-Clarks piece Splitting combined both the alteration of a single structure and a record of spatial transformation in terms of a series of photo collages based on pictures taken of the interior and exterior of the house. MattaClark obtained the building from Holly and Horace Solomon, who owned
the la nd in En glewood, New Jersey, o n w hich t he small ho use s at. MattaClarks idea for the work was simple enough: to cut the house down its center
from the roof to the foundation and then to alter the foundation so the cut
would be opened up like a crac k down the center of the house.56 The work
was labor intensive, as testified by the film Matta-Clark produced to record
the process of making the piece. In the end, it produced not only a space that
was complex for a vie wer who walked through it but also a w ork that was
complex in terms of the way it marked and framed time and history.
Matta-Clark commented that he ho ped the alterations in a sim ple structure like a sub urban house would lead the viewer to pay attention to those
aspects of the structure that had b een taken for granted: You see that light
enters places it otherwise couldnt. Angles and depths can be perceived where
they should have been hidden. Spaces are available to move through that were
previously inaccessible. My hope is [t hat] the dynamism of the action can
beseen as a n alternative vocabulary with which to question the static inert
building environment.57
In 1974, a rtist a nd cr itic Al B runelle wr ote a bout visi ting Splitting in a
gallery-sponsored bus trip out to the New Jersey site. He describes what it
was like to be in t he house. He, like many other writers, described how the
light that entered through the cut was knife-like and surprising. The experience of walking through the house freshened his perceptions of such quotid-
FIGURE
1 . 3 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, documentation, 1974. 2011 Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
ian architecture: The entire web of meaning and associations generated by

structures, and more particularly, houses, is left unburdened, freed from the
weight of habitual assumptions.58 The house seemed lighter in terms of both
illumination and atmosphere.
Another commentator notes that it became more and more intimidating
to cross the cut because, as one climbed the stairs, the gap between the two
halves became wider and wider. The cut both joined inside and outside and
made the interior a challenge to negotiate and to comprehend, even as it exposed the things that were hidden in a normal house: the basement and the
attic. In the act of cutting open the house, privacy was e vacuated from the
house. It was a way of opening up an entire history and set of practices around
domestic living that have become so habitual as to be invisible.
In looking at the small book Splitting that Matta-Clark produced after the
project, it is clear that he wanted to emphasize not only the object-like quality
of the small b uilding when it was c ut but also that this project was a small
51
52
slice o ut o f t he lo nger hist ory o f t he ho use. W hile t urning t he pag es, t he

viewer gets a v ery clear sense that this was a p roject that had a b eginning
and an end that coincided with the demise of the old house itself. The book
is small and cheaply produced with grainy black-and-white photographs. It is
only thirty-four pages long and tells a st ory of the discovery of the house,
itsalteration, and final demise. With each page, the viewer moves not only
through the house but also through time as the project goes forward.59
In the book, the photographs become the body of the house, and they define the space and limits of the house for the viewer. There are two kinds of
images in the book: mug shots, which is a term that Anne Wagner uses, of the
house, showing t he faades a nd sides o f t he str ucture, and complex photo
collages that show the alteration to the interior spaces of the house that took
place when it was c ut.60 The mug shots also serve as a s eries of before and
after images that demonstrate what happened to the house from the outside.
They are comical because they show the house as a diminutive object that fits
on a small b ook page. The exterior shots have been cut from larger photographs, freed of their backgrounds and printed as if t he blank white of the
page were the context for the house. In one image of the side of the house, bare
tree branches stretch across the clapboard wall of the structure. In the book,
the cut in the house is made by cutting a thin slice out of the photograph, and
in this photograph, Matta-Clark is careful to keep the delicate paper branches
of the tree intact.
Certain rules are adhered to in the construction of this photo world. The
photo collages map the interior of the house for the viewer, and the span of
the map is dictated by the expanse of the cut. Over the course of the thirtyfour pages, the photo collages grow in complexity from two photographs
joined where the cut crosses the floor of a room to an entire half of the house
that is composed of several different photographs joined together.
The photograph is at once a flat, thin surface and an illusionistic space. It
points to the complex ways viewers read the frame of an image and what it
frames. A f rame is b oth a b oundary and a signifier that directs the viewers
attention and renders what is within something to be looked at, while designating what is outside it something to be ignored. The manner in which
viewers have regarded frames and the images and spaces they enclose/produce
has developed over centuries, as Brian ODoherty argued, and has been dictated by the cultural use to which images have been put. Matta-Clarks images
FIGURE
1 . 4 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974. 2011 Estate of Gordon
Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
present us with three different ways of reading what we are presented with:
an image that is read as a windo w; an image that is read as a sur face; and a
space presented as a unified object.
In an interview for the catalog for Office Baroque, which was made in Antwerp in 1977, Matta-Clark explained, Why hang things on a wall when the
wall itself is s o much more a c hallenging medium? It is t he rigid mentality
that architects install the walls and artists decorate them that offends my sense
of either profession. A simple cut or series of cuts acts as a powerful drawing
device a ble t o r edefine spa tial si tuations a nd str uctural co mponents.61
Matta-Clark is also talking about his photo-collage pieces in this paragraph
and the way that these works break the conventional frame of the photograph
and the single-point perspective in which the space of a photographic image
is structured.
The book represents the movement of a seeing body that can walk on two
legs, as i t moves t hrough t he house. We b egin in t he bas ement w here two
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snapshots show us a lo w-ceilinged room that is filled with old clothes and
appliances. In one image, an old clothesline jags across the photograph as an
old rumpled coat hangs from a wire hanger. It is unclear why these two images are joined where they are until we notice in the background a complete
stairway that crosses the two images. It invites us to go upstairs.
When t he c ut has b een made in ho use in t he narrative of t he b ook, we
move through the house looking up staircases and across rooms to windows
where the sunlight streams in t o dusty bare spaces. The line o f the cut that
divides each room also dictates how the camera surveys each space. The sole
coherent thing in the photo collages is the line of this cut, which jogs across
stairs and streaks through the ceilings of rooms, while the rooms themselves
tumble around its axis.
In the most dramatic example of this, the camera looks up from the bottom of the stairs over the second-floor hallway to the roof. In the lowest picture, the camera is placed on the stairs looking through the banister out the
windows of a r oom on the first floor, as t he cut slices acr oss the stairs, the
banister, and the ceiling of the first-floor room. The next two pictures, joined
by the cut, look up the stairs and at the second floor banister from below,
following the line o f the cut through the ceiling and the banister. The next
photograph frames the ceiling and an opening in the attic, showing us the cut
as it opens to the sky a nd lets in sunlig ht. The cut opens the roof and then
widens as it comes down the far wall (which would be on the other side of the
camera and invisible).
However, t he ca mera r ecords as dis continuous a mo vement t hrough a
space that to the eyes is continuous. Because it conforms to the dictates of
aflat surface rather than an illusionistic three-dimensional space, the photographic imag e dist orts t he way a n embodied e ye s ees t he space . Time has
been infused into this image the image portrays successive moments as if
they were one moment and a space that cannot be grasped at one glance, as
if it could be. The photographs try to acknowledge that a vie wer turns and
moves her head while staying in the same place. The collages are evocative of
the way that Nick Kaye describes the viewer producing the space o f a si tespecific work by performing in it.
In these still images and static objects, Matta-Clark nearly captures a sense
of dure the word coined by Henri B ergson. B ergson describes how the
process of perception is bound with memory. In memory, the immaterial past
FIGURE
1 . 5 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974.
2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
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expands into the present moment of somatic perception.62 Instead of being a

distinct instance of recollection, the process occurs continually. Each moment
is divided between the past and the future. The virtual past moment contracts
toward the future, and becomes material a perception in the present. At the
same time, the present dilates, is made vir tual, and falls away into the past.
Duration is the connection between these two moments, which are held together for a short while before they are differentiated. Memory, according to
Gilles Deleuze, is duration. I say that Matta-Clark nearly captures the sense of
duration because Bergson claims duration is more accurate than the cinematographical or scientific depiction of experience. We could say that the gap
between Matta-Clarks snapshots, the flicker of the images, as in a film, points
to th e duration th at w e cannot experien ce a s view ers of s till p hotographs.
And Matta-Clark arranged the text in the book as if it were a silent film.
Because of the nature of the photographs in Splitting, viewers of these images a nd ob jects a re made a ware o f t he sim ultaneity o f time s cales in t he
work. They are given a literal illustration via the collage technique of the difficulty of synthesizing many distinct p erceptions into a me aningful whole.
Bergson uses the mundane example of a person waiting for sugar to melt in
a glass of water. Waiting bespeaks an expectation that time pass es at a ra te
based on ones own duration, but it comes into direct conflict with the duration of sugar melting. In the impatience of waiting, the people who wait become aware both of their own duration and that of others.63 In Matta-Clarks
entire Splitting project, we become aware that there is t he time s cale of the
house and its history, which as Anne Wagner notes, opens up the work to the
social context of the site. But there is also the time scale of the cut and, finally,
that of the photographs that form a flickering sequence. Bergson claims that
one b ecomes aware of duration in t he interaction of multiple rhythms. In
Matta-Clarks work, the synchronic aspect of the work the mapping of the
space is acknowledged. But so too is t he diachronic in t he movement of
the body through the house and the making and eventual disappearance of
the w ork in time . The p hotographs capture t he s ense o f de velopment a nd
decay that fascinated Matta-Clark in organic processes.
The photographic documentation of Matta-Clarks work, like the catalog
for the Rooms exhibition, is constructed as a narrative that tries to interject a
sense of time and movement that the still photographs do not have. Narrative
structures or sequences seem to be required to compensate for the stillness
and silence o f the photographs. This points to photographys connection to

language.
The Act of Looking: ___________, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and

CindySherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized
byJanelle Reiring at Artists Space, September 23 to October 28, 1978
A year after Rosalind Krausss second article titled Notes on the Index had
appeared in October, a group of young artists invited by the gallerist Janelle
Reiring pa rticipated in a n exhib ition ti tled ___________, Lo uise La wler,
Adrian Piper and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition
Organized b y J anelle Rei ring a t A rtists S pace, S eptember 23 t o O ctober 28,
1978, at the alternative space Artists Space in Manhattan. In this exhibition,
photography replaced language as t he device that presents questions about
the frame. Each of the works uses language or refers to a narrative structure.
Rather than engaging the viewer as a b ody, the works in this exhibition ask
the viewer to interpret texts and to evaluate positions in t he art world. The
artists works in the exhibition differed starkly from each other, underscoring
the conceptual dimension of the theme of the exhibition, which emphasized
the way that viewers see and read works in an exhibition space.
Artists Space o pened in 1972 under t he direction o f Trudie G race a nd
Irving Sandler as a space that was devoted to showing the work of young artists t hat had b een chosen by other artists.64 The galler y was o pened at t he
intersection of Wooster and Houston Street. In 1975, Helene Winer became
the director of Ar tists Space and moved t he galler y to 105 H udson Street.
When Winer became director of Artists Space, it marked a change in the direction of the gallery. Winer and the others at Artists Space wanted to give
the gallery a clear identity. In an interview with Cindy Sherman, Valerie Smith,
and Matt Mullican, Winer said, I just wanted to set up a situation that would
introduce a lot of challenging work. Artists Space took on an identity that a
lot of artists wanted to be associated with. Also it was a different time in the
art world. It was the beginning of this notion that art could be both visually
seductive and conceptually serious.65
The exhibition initiated by Janelle Reiring the following year represented
acareful look at the exhibition space as a political and social frame by using
various strategies. Winer asked Reiring to organize a show at Artists Space,
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and Reiring had the idea of an exhibition of artists work that addresses the
issue of how art is presented and, in turn, how it is seen.66 At the time, Reiring was working for Leo Castelli Gallery, but she insists that the idea for the
show did not come from her experience working at a gallery but rather from
the work of the artists who were in the show.
At C astelli, she had met a nd b ecome f riends wi th L ouise L awler, a nd
through that friendship met Christopher DArcangelo. Reiring describes the
contemporary art scene in New York at the time as small and close knit.67 The
third participant in the exhibition was Cindy Sherman, who happened to be
working at Artists Space at the time. According to Reiring, Sherman would
arrive at her job as receptionist without fanfare, dressed in various outfits and
disguises. B ased o n t hese sp ontaneous p erformances, Reir ing t hought her
work wou ld fit in w ell to t he exhibition. The last pa rticipant was t he b estknown artist, but she was no longer participating in the New York art scene.
After making important contributions in co nceptual art, Adrian Piper had
gone on to Harvard University to study for a PhD in p hilosophy. Piper had
already exhibited in 1974 a t Artists Space with a p erformance and series of
photographs with text bubbles titled Talking to Myself, the Ongoing Autobiography of an Art Object.68 Reiring had s een Pipers work when she had
first come to New York in the early 1970s and liked it. So, she wrote to Piper
and asked her to participate in the show.
Between Viewer and Artwork

Louise Lawler and Christopher DArcangelo shared a large room at 105 Hudson Street; the room had a set of windows that looked out on the faade of the
Citibank building across the street. Another set of windows looked into an
interior space. Louise Lawlers untitled piece consisted of a painting that she
had borrowed from the New York Racing Associations Aqueduct Race Track.
The painting Black Race Horse depicted a ho rse in p rofile and was pa inted
in1863 by painter Henry Stull.69 Lawler hung the painting so that it partially
obscured some of the interior windows in t he exhibition space. Above the
painting she in stalled a b right t heater lig ht s o t hat it shone directly at any
viewer w ho tr ied to lo ok at t he painting.70 She installed another s o t hat it
shone out the windows of Artists Space on Hudson Street onto the faade of
the Citibank building across the way.
In turning t he sp otlight around on t he vie wer and on t he street, L awler

made the viewer aware that the act of viewing, who was looking and who was
not looking, was as m uch a part of the art as the arrangement itself. Lawler
explained her choice this way in the Artists Space anniversary catalog: In a
very corny way, part of the point was to signal that something was going on
at Artists Space. I felt it was a very distinct audience of young artists looking
at each others work; and being on the second floor, nobody in the neighborhood, in w hat wasnt yet called TriBeCa, was t oo aware of Artists Space.71
Artists S pace ca tered t o t he co mmunity o f y oung a vant-garde a rtists w ho
knew enough t o s ee t he show a nd w ould ne ver st ep f oot in t he galler y of
paintings at the Aqueduct Race Track. Lawler planned to highlight the difference between a certain type of art (i.e., traditional naturalistic painting) and
the new art being produced at the time. While squinting in the bright light,
viewers were made aware that they wanted to see the painting and that, in a
certain sense, they were being put on stage and looked at while they were
trying to look at the painting. In this way, Lawler sought to raise the selfawareness of her viewers at Artists Space and underlined the social divisions
between the audiences of the two exhibition spaces.
Christopher D Arcangelo p erformed s everal p rocedures t hat p rovided
an anonymous comment on t he exhibition and t he exhibition space i tself.
DArcangelo removed his name from the show and any announcement about
the show. In an interesting way, DArcangelos act of pulling his na me from
the promotion of the show means that his work has been ignored in popular
memory o f t his exhib ition, w hich p oints t o t he significance o f t he p hotographs and catalog in constructing our understanding of these exhibitions of
installation art.
In his piece, four separate sheets of paper were pasted to a small wall that
jutted out into the space t hat held L awlers work. In looking at the painting
hung on the wall after looking out the windows, the viewer would discover
DArcangelos work. The Artists Space archives have only a few slides showing the text on the wall. The text, however, appears in the anniversary catalog 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space, and it demonstrates, as L awler attests, t hat she a nd DArcangelo had b een t alking about t heir contribution
to the exhib ition. DArcangelos t ext is di vided into f our pa rts: (1) Ar tists
Space: Where Are You and Whats in a Name? (2) Design, Name, Propaganda;
(3)Propaganda/Context; and (4) Being in a Public Space. The texts comment
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FIGURE
1 . 6 L ouise Lawler, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.
on the significance of Artists Space and its relationship to the viewer but also
the exhibition spaces less visible connection to a system of money and propaganda, to use the artists term, incorporating larger social institutions and
finally the capitalist system.
The texts appeared on different walls of the space as o ne walked through
the exhibition. Louise Lawler has said that DArcangelos work was to be included in every room of the space.72 Addressing the viewer, they functioned
like a narrator to the viewers experience of the show. And they encompassed
the space as a w hole without interfering with t he other a rtists w ork. L ike
Lawlers a rrangement, w hich, ho wever, o perates mo re o n t he le vel o f t he
viewers exp ectations o f visual a rt, D Arcangelos t ext in vites t he r eader t o
think about what the space is and how it functions:
At this time you are in a divided space, Artists Space. Your reason for being
here can be one of many, but your being here subjects you to the limitations
FIGURE
1 . 7 C hristopher DArcangelo, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.
imposed by design and based on the function of the space. How can you see
itsfunction? How can you know its limitations? . . . One could say that the
austere design of this place helps to obscure its function. At this point one
must be careful, for all this austerity can show the function of the space when
it is connected with the idea that an object alone is more visible than an object
in a group. Thus the design of Artists Space shows us one aspect of its function:
to help us see (better) the objects placed in the space.73
This is an excerpt from DArcangelos first section of text, but by the third
the anonymous interlocutor has a rgued that in fac t one of the functions of
Artists Space is t o obscure its connections to broader networks of government and corporate funding. Thus, the purpose of Artists Space, the anonymous text tells the viewer, is to highlight some aspects of Artists Space and
distract attention from others in a conceptual act of spotlighting that parallels Lawlers own.
The final block of text brings the specificity of the work in time and place
to the viewers attention. It questions the art content of the text blocks themselves and t hen goes on t o explain how t he work was made: The process
used to install t his work on t he wall was t he s ame process as t hat us ed to
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make the printing plate for the announcement and catalog for this exhibition. . . . Three copies of this work were made. The typeset and negative were
destroyed at the time that the work was exposed. In this way, the text points
to not only its own production but also its circumscription and destruction,
as a site-specific installation.
Adrian Piper installed a piece in a small alcove at Artists Space that combined sound and images. The work was located in a room separated from the
other pieces that a viewer was required to enter. Upon turning a corner, the
viewer was greeted by an image depicting black South Africans descending a
staircase. The photograph was printed at 30 by 30 inches and positioned so
that viewers felt as if they were located in a space lower than the figures in the
photograph. The a rtist intended t he enco unter t o b e co nfrontational o r at
least puzzling. The taped voice begins by telling viewers what they (the viewers) want: It doesnt matter who these people are. Theyre parts of a piece of
art, which is part of an art exhibit, in an art gallery, in Soho, in New York City.
This gallery is o ne of the best: progressive, daring, shows some of the most
interesting and aesthetically innovative work around. You expect, and hope,
that when you leave this gallery, your conception of what art can be will be
altered, maybe even expanded, if o nly by the smallest f raction.74 Later, the
voice goes on to say,
In looking at this picture, you carefully monitor any subliminal or undisciplined reactions you have to this image of assertive aggressive, angry-looking
blacks; they might be a part of the piece. In fact, all your reactions, all your
thoughts about what youre now experiencing might be part of this piece. In
this space, in this gallery, in front of this picture, you dont want to let your
politics interfere with or deaden your aesthetic perceptions, but rather
contribute to them: your political reactions are part of the art experience
youare trying to have.
Like Lawler and DArcangelos works, Piper makes the viewer aware of her
act of looking, her a ttempt to read the image. And lik e L awlers work, this
self-awareness comes about in part because of the way the artist has arranged
the material in the space and her use of language as a framing device. A photograph does not have intrinsic meaning. Allan Sekula describes the photograph as something that is always snatched up by a motivated discourse. The
process of critique proceeds by discovering the historical discourse by which
the photograph was snatched and analyzing its politics and their manifestation in readings of the image.
Pipers piece responds to other images of people of color. In an analysis of
nineteenth-century anthropological photographs taken of people in Af rica,
anthropologist Gwyn Prins p oints to t he way photographs are read differently by various audiences. Although a photograph may depict individuals in
a way that within their own culture signifies dignity, in Western cultural contexts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the image will b e read in a
different way.75 For instance, the scientific discourse steers viewers readings
of an image. They describe one photograph in which the individual does not
look at the camera, which has been placed on a stand. The viewers see a profile of the individual, evincing a sense of distance between the viewer and the
object of t he camera gaze. The sur veying p osition of t he camera amplifies
subjects lack of engagement with the photographer. Circulating in a Western
scientific context, the photograph might be read as a typ e or a specimen,
according to Prins.
As work from the 1970s on documentary photography argued, the documentary photograph underwrites and supports whatever reading is given to
it by the discourse into which it is inco rporated.76 The photograph, in g eneral, because of its portable, fragmentary nature, objectifies the subject depicted. The photograph is considered evidence because it is assumed to be
objective, transparent, and an index. The invisibility of the photographer, the
camera, and the viewer underscores that the viewer should read the photograph as objective.
Pipers work puts viewers in the position to question the way they read the
image in her p iece by using language to address the viewers. Piper has described her a pproach els ewhere as the indexical p resent, w hich is a n a ttempt to provoke the viewers defensive reactions to images and then draw
the viewers attention to that defensive reaction or discomfort. In reflecting
on this discomfort and transforming it into language, the artist hopes, viewers become aware of the rigid, stereotypical categories that they use to process encounters such as this.
Pipers work draws attention, as Roland Barthes argues that a critical reading of photographs should, to the ways in which viewers cultural lexica condition their reading of photographic images in particular. By making it difficult to look at without thinking, Pipers piece defies the expectations that one
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carries to a traditional gallery space. Piper chose an image in which the subject looks directly at the camera, and she made i t large enough that the figures depicted look down from a height at viewers. She then supplies an authoritative voice that insists that viewers pay attention to their responses to the
image. Rather than offering up images of these black men to the viewers gaze,
the encounter borders on a confrontation that the viewer must contemplate.
Janelle Reiring had invited Sherman to exhibit because of her performance
on the job at Artists Space, but Sherman instead exhibited her film stills for
the first time. The film stills also drew on the ability of viewers to read cultural codes but challenged the viewer more obliquely. The Sherman images
were hung along a corridor. As recorded in one of the images in the Artists
Space archives, the film stills that Sherman showed have become well known.
These included the image of the starlet with a dark, beehive hairdo and sunglasses, leaning out a sun-drenched patio door in a dr unken manner (Untitled Film Still #7) and the model, lying on a bed, robe thrown open to show
her dressed in a bra and panties (Untitled Film Still #6). These prints were
hung on the wall in a traditional manner: one after the other. They were large
and t acked unf ramed t o t he wall o f t he galler y. S ome co mmentators have
noted that it is necessary to see Shermans pieces one after another, in order
to understand her work of dress up and play act, by comparing one image to
the next. The images are traps that catch viewers in t he act of looking and
categorizing, by coaxing viewers to draw on their knowledge of visual codes
acquired via t he mass media. I n the process, viewers realize that the figure
inthe photograph has become an object of the gaze and the subject of a sexist
cultural discourse.
Reiring noted that the responses to the show were varied but that Shermans pieces were an immediate hit. People, however, were more puzzled by
the other artists work. Lawler has indicated that the audience for the show
was the usual art audience with a lot of young artists interested in looking at
other young artists work.77 Although the artists knew the audience that was
going to see the work, the intention of the work did not always convey clearly
to viewers.78 An example of this is April Kingsleys review of the show for the
Village Voice. Adrian Piper is the only artist who stands out in the show, according to the review. Kingsley complains that artists works spill into each
others spaces, and that, combined with the anonymity of some of the artists,
makes it difficult to determine the limits and authorship of each piece. She
cites t he influences of artists, such as H ans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, R afael

Ferrer, Michael Asher, and even Marcel Duchamp. She goes further in complaining about the lack of clear authorial integrity by asserting that one of
the artists s eems embarrassingly derivative of the early work of another.79
What the Kingsley review seems to miss is the site-specific aspect of the exhibition and the work in it. As such, the context and content of the work derives not so much from the careers and oeuvres of the individual artists but
rather from the encounter with these works of art in this particular space.
One of the interesting aspects of the exhibition is that it was so spare. Ther e
was very little for the viewer to look at but the blank walls of the exhibition
space. If we think about this in terms of framing the exhibition space and compare, for instance, Louise Lawlers work to Christopher DArcangelos, it is easy
to s ee t hat t he significance of L awlers maneuvers was mo re ambiguous
DArcangelos less so because he used text.
And it is the textual aspect of the work that returns us to Krausss comments
about the function of the frame in the photograph. In her essay Notes on the
Index, Krauss argues that the framing that takes place in the photograph or,
I w ould add , t he in stallation brings t he p resence o f t he b uilding t o t he
viewers attention and renders that framed portion significant but ambiguous.
A supplementary text is r equired, a ca ption of some sort. And, rather than
photographs, the materials that provide the most information about this exhibition thirty years on are the texts and narratives about the exhibition.
The Catalog
The catalog for the show is equally spare; the photographs are few, and there
are no installation shots. Instead, language replaces the photographs. The catalog has tw enty pages with a b lack paper cover sized 9.5 b y 8 inc hes and a
logo designed b y L awler o f a w hite A, wi th Artists Space p rinted o n t he
cross-bar, placed within a circle. The pages were shared out to the organizer
and artists. Reiring contributed a text explaining the genesis of the exhibition.
DArcangelos section consists of blank pages, and Lawlers points to the cover
as her design. P ipers pages begin with the question What is t he aesthetic
content of this work? Then it shows a detail of the photograph and gives its
origin as National Geographic magazine. The next tw o pages give the complete text of the audio component of the piece. The catalog concludes with
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four reproductions of Shermans photographs. The catalog gives no c lue as

tothe layout of the space, as the Rooms catalog did, and even more it leaves
Lawlers and DArcangelos works a mystery.
The spare catalog suggests a few things. First, it is clear that Artists Spaces
budget was no t lavish a nd t he catalog designer s a nd a rtists did w hat t hey
could to adapt to these circumstances. Second, the engagement of the viewers b ody is do wnplayed in t he exhib ition. L awler s ays t hat she p roduced
black-and-white press photographs of her work and that each was a detail of
the work, underlining the sense that the work included not just the actual
arrangement by Lawler but also the social context of the work.80 The specific,
material qualities of the space ma tter less t han its position within a field of
exhibition spaces a nd the social context of the art world. Language is w hat
directs the viewers attention to these aspects of the exhibition and the work
of the artists who participated.
We have at least two examples in w hich dialog b etween the work (or the
artist) and the viewer was established: Adrian Pipers sound installation and
DArcangelos text. In Lawlers, the pull of language is more subtle. Her piece
performs the basic procedure of a syst em of meaning: it demonstrates difference. In other words, Lawler presents us with the opportunity to compare
the difference between the painting and the space in which it has been hung.
Furthermore, t he difference b etween the commonplace conventions of the
traditional or modernist gallery space and the exhibition situation presented
at Artists Space is r evealed by viewers frustrated desire to see the painting
obscured by the spotlight shining in their eyes.
Cindy Shermans work, of course, points to a narrative structure of which
each indi vidual imag e is a pa rt. D ouglas Cr imp p resented t his r eading o f
Shermans work in the essay written about an exhibition he organized at Artists Space the year previous. Sherman did not participate in this exhibition,
titled Pictures, which took place in the fall of 1977, but she is f orever associated with it b ecause of t he revised v ersion of Cr imps ess ay, w hich later
appeared in October, included an image and discussion of Shermans work
absent in t he o riginal t ext.81 The sho w ac tually inc luded w ork b y Rob ert
Longo, Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein, Troy Brauntuch, and Philip Smith.
Pictures was a n exhib ition in w hich t he a rtists a nd t he c urator had a bsorbed ideas about the nature of photography presented in Walter Benjamins
writings. Echoing the end of Rosalind Krausss second Notes on the Index
essay, which draws from Benjamin and Barthes, Crimp argues that the films
and photographs in t he show were f ragments of a na rrative. Cr imps ess ay
argued for the emergence of a new kind of art that played with the ambivalent nature of the photograph. The photograph is a kind o f presence while
atthe same time being the physical manifestation of the absence of the thing
it dep icts. I n K rausss a rgument t he dir ect p resentation o f a p hotographic
image, the body of an old school building, or the cut-out section of an old
tenement floor, begs for a supplementary text. This insight derives from Walter Benjamins assertion that a photograph requires a caption in order to be
read. Derrida argues something similar with reference to the parergon, the
frame: What constitutes them as parerga is not simply their exteriority as a
surplus, it is the internal structural link which rivets them to the lack in the
interior of the ergon. And this lack would be constitutive of the very unity of
the ergon.82 Both photography and language serve to frame site-specific installation in t he 1970s. I t is in stallation that draws the viewers attention to
the frame of the work in the form of the exhibition space and in the form of
the procedures of the art institution that render the work a legitimate aspect
of art practice.
Within t he examples of installation art I ha ve dis cussed, t here s eems to
bea group of works that can be effectively photographed and another group
that cannot be photographed. Those works that cannot be effectively photographed emphasize the viewers experience and sense in real time. Thes e works
point bac k t o t he vie wer a nd f ocus o n t he indi vidual in ternal exp erience.
Those works amenable to photography and that use language point outward,
focusing o n co ntext a nd, as a r esult, o ften cr itique a rt w orld ideo logy. A s
such, the work in the Artists Space exhibition refuses to be autonomous and
remains dependent on its particular place and time; this work draws on photography and language as a tool to critique the art practice in a particular site.
Hence, even in this exhibition, a couple of years after the Rooms exhibition,
site-specificity has been revealed to have another dimension.
The Frames of Installations

In t he exa mples o f in stallation a rt dis cussed in t his c hapter, t he no tion o f
the relationship b etween t he w ork a nd t he f rame ergon and parergon
the documentary photograph, and the installation has proved quite variable.
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Rooms showed the variety of ways artists used the old school space as a kind
of frame for their installations. In comparing the variety of ways that artists
interpreted the relationship between their works and the spaces t hey were
in,it is possible to see that the installations ranged from those in which the
building sur faces o r dis appears in r elation t o t he w ork t o t hose in w hich
thebuilding surface is part of the work. It might be well at this point to return
to a nother pass age f rom D erridas The Truth in P ainting: Parerga ha ve a
thickness, a sur face which separates them not only (as K ant would have it)
from the integral side, from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the
outside, from the wall on which the painting is hung, from the space in which
statue or column is erected.83
Brian ODoherty noted that the flat surface of abstract, modernist painting
had placed pressure on the frame and in t urn brought the wall o n which it
was hung into play as part of the art. I argue that the Rooms exhibition demonstrates how flexibly the exhibition space functions as a frame for the work.
In more site-specific pieces, such as Richard Serras trench in t he attic or in
Gordon M atta-Clarks w ork, t he wall was t hinned until i t f olded into t he
material of the work itself. But the wall could also be thickened, as in Dennis
Oppenheims work, until it disappears altogether f rom the viewers field of
attention and becomes just support for a work, which functions more like a
traditional naturalistic painting in relation to its frame.
In Gordon Matta-Clarks cuts, the cut itself is a kind of frame that not only
points to the immediate object-quality of the house, room, or warehouse but
also sets off the durational aspect of the site itself, highlighting the way the
structure has changed over time and pointing inward to the temporary quality of Matta-Clarks own short-lived interventions. These arcs of development
and decay are made concrete in Matta-Clarks photographs and books, which
are presented as sequences.
The work at Artists Space differs from the previous examples. As in Rooms
and Matta-Clarks works, the works in the exhibition point to the immediate
conditions of the space. However, these artists are focusing on not the works
relationship to the exhibition space as a material limit to the work but rather
the significance of the space as an institution in the art scene of the time. And
as Janelle Reiring points out, the gesture, except for Cindy Shermans work,
was confusing t o vie wers. In contrast t o t he Rooms exhibition, t hey didnt
quite know what to make of it. And perhaps this lack of communication has
to do with the fact that viewers, such as Nancy Foote, were able to fit the work
in the Room exhibition into the familiar language of postminimal, conceptual, and p erformance art. The Ar tists Space exhibition represented s omething new. In pointing to the wall o f the exhibition space, the artists in t he
Artists S pace exhib ition w ere als o p ointing b eyond t o t he immediate su pporting systems of the art market, museum, mass media, a nd art history of
the late 1970s, which is regarded by viewers as exterior to the progressive and
uncompromised al ternative a rt space . Parerga have a t hickness, a sur face
which separates them not only (as Kant would have it) from the integral side,
from the body proper of the ergon, but also from the outside, from the wall
on which the painting is hung, from the space in w hich statue or column is
erected, then, step by step, from the whole field of historical, economic, political
inscription in which the drive to signature is produced (emphasis mine).84
One of the aspects of the Artists Space exhibition that distinguishes it from
the Rooms exhibition at PS1 is how dispersed the elements of the show were.
The artists pointed always to systems and media beyond the exhibition space
itself. Chr istopher D Arcangelo did s o b y r emoving a ny ad vertisement o f
hiswork or name beyond the confines of the galler y space. L awler, on the
other hand, created a succinct but ambiguous logo that was printed on 81/2 by
11 inch paper and posted in various locations in Lower Manhattan. Piper and
Shermans work points to social practices in looking as well as the social conventions that condition understandings of race and gender that pervade the
exhibition space and the world outside. In this way, we can say that the works
in t he Ar tists S pace show f unction lik e p hotographs in t heir sp ecificity in
relation to time (in hist ory) and place (material and social context), as well
astheir need for supplementary texts. Unlike in the Rooms exhibition or in
Matta-Clarks Splitting, these artists relied on not photographs to frame their
work within the context of the art world but rather language.
The Historical Impact of Catalogs as Photographic Archives

The catalogs, photographs, and texts are supplements that frame these works
and exhibitions. We can consider them archives of a sort, and their rules guide
how we read and understand and remember these exhibitions. The Rooms
catalog substitutes for the pieces in the exhibition and they were removed and,
in some cases, destroyed when the exhibition was over. The catalog system-
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atically mapped the show via photographs, floor plans, and viewers personal
experiences. The photographs in the publication are treated as simple documentary images that have been arranged in b ook format in t he same order
that one might walk through the exhibition, providing a persuasive substitute
for the experience itself.
The text that seems to have defined the exhibition the most in the context
of art history, however, is Krausss Notes on the Index, Part 2, which focuses
on only a few site-specific pieces in the show in order to make the claim that
art of the 1970s differs from that of the 1960s. For instance, Krauss chose an
earlier piece by Dennis Oppenheim titled Identity Stretch that was si te specific and depended on photographic documentation. She included this piece
rather than the more figurative and theatrical piece he made f or the Rooms
exhibition titled Broken Record Blues. As a result of Krausss choices, the great
variety of ways t hat artists in t his show interpreted t he installation format
and context of the old school building as a frame has been overlooked in art
history.
Matta-Clarks photographs shape how we understand his work and substitute for the now-lost buildings and cuts. The photographs bridge the lack that
has b een p roduced b y t he pass age o f time , s erving as r ough o utlines f or
something one can no longer experience. They approximate the bodily experience of his altered spaces while remaining in themselves complex studies of
the way that the frame of the photograph shapes visual spaces. In their partiality and insufficiency, the photographs serve as markers for the passage of
time, marking the distance between the current viewer and the disappeared
work.
The works in the Artists Space show differ once again from the two previous examples in that the photographic documentation is quite minimal and
little published. The catalog includes very few images but at least two texts.
The same is tr ue of the archival material at Artists Space that has remained
from the show. Christopher DArcangelo refused to have his name circulate
outside the exhibition space in p ress releases or the catalog. For this reason
and because of his unf ortunate early death, he t ends to be forgotten in t his
exhibition. L awler, P iper, a nd esp ecially Cind y S herman a re r emembered
inthis exhibition because their works either outlasted the show (in the case
of Piper and Sherman) or were documented by photographs. The works focused viewers attention on their participation in or exclusion from broader
structures and s ocial practices in t he art world. The artists chose to draw
viewers attention to the specificity of their placement in a social context at a
particular time (this dimension of site-specificity) primarily via language.
Especially b ecause it is a ub iquitous art practice, it is im portant t o pay
attention to the way works of installation art manipulate the notion of the
frame. L ike a p hotograph, installation always calls f or a su pplement, s ome
kind of frame within the context of the art world, even as it may deny its need
for a frame. This need for a supplement, as Derrida would say, points to a lack
of a secure identity. Installation art can have an ever-expanding set of frames,
ranging from the literal space and time in which it has been made to the less
immediate ideological structures that lend it meaning. Much of the writing
on installation art has noted this aspect of it. However, these ideological and
discursive structures can include not only the literal exhibition space but also
the photographs and texts that populate exhibition catalogs of installation art:
the archives of these works. These images and documents, even if t hey are
considered su pplementary t o t he w ork, co ntinue t o co ndition o ur under standing of the work in important ways.
The next chapter describes the work of Rene Green whose pieces focus on
the issue of framing and the archive and asks the viewer to question how the
way photographs are hung, arranged, and framed affects our understanding
of history and memory. Greens work takes the historical photographic archive and renders it something that we must read and criticize.
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TWO
the politics of representation

ARCHIVE AND MEMORY IN THE WORK OF RENE GREEN
Photography in Site-Specific Installation Art

Fragments and ephemera from the past are gathered in an installation. Small
pieces of crumbly concrete are arranged under a g lass vitrine that is s et on
asimple white table along with a map and some paperback books. Music of
the 1970s p lays on a boom box, and black-and-white photographs of 1970s
protesters are hung on the walls (figure 2.1).1 Videotapes play on monitors
alongside a co llection of vinyl albums and a t urntable. The narrator of one
video relates the following event:
The girl watched the news and waited anxiously, often. Thats part of what
she recollects of childhood. Waiting. Seeing the running text of news reporting students shot at Kent State moving across the bottom of the t v screen.
t v programs were interrupted and her mother was late returning home
from there. Across the street, kids played Jackson 5 45s and Sly Stone. The
girl smoothed her bedspread and checked for order. Finally her mother did
arrive, but she cant remember now what either said. It was May 4th, 1970.
(Video transcript, Partially Buried)
The girls memory recounted in the film Partially Buried is the artists memory, which is then dispersed into the broader collection of objects and recordings that constitute the installation Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts produced
in 19961997. These v estiges o f t he 1970s a re all co nnected wi th Rob ert
Smithsons site-specific earthwork Partially Buried Woodshed and the shooting of student protesters at Kent State University in 1970. In this piece, Green
examines t he co nnections b etween p ersonal memo ry, p hotographs, do cu-
T H E P O L I T I C S O F R E P R E S E N TAT I O N
ments, and artifacts. This is a work of installation art that takes as part of its
subject matter the documentation of a previous work of site-specific art and
the historical context of which it is a part. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts asks
questions about documentation and its relationship to memory and history.
This chapter argues t hat, in ma ny of Rene G reens pieces, she us es t he
arrangement a nd exa mination of p hotographs a nd p hotographic media as
away of addressing issues of history and memory through the format of the
archive. G reens w ork co nnects t o co nceptual a rt in t he 1960s a nd 1970s,
which utilized serial structures and was interested in scrutinizing systems of
representation and language. It is already well established that Robert Smithsons work is a precedent for site-specific installation art such as Greens, but
one could include as well Marcel Broodthaerss and John Baldessaris work as
well. The artists who were included in t he Artists Space exhibition, such as
Adrian Piper, Chr istopher DArcangelo, and L ouise L awler, are als o precedents for this type of work in installation art in that they ask the viewer to be
active readers of the work and its situation.
Greens archival practice brings together issues o f photography and sitespecificity.2 Analog photographs bear the touch of light and shadow available
at a particular time and in a particular place. Photography has a specificity to
it that, as we have seen, connects it to those site-specific installations built in
place in spaces a nd str uctures, suc h as PS1 o r G ordon M atta-Clarks o ld
house. Like these works, the photograph is an index. In the writings of Roland Barthes, Allan Sekula, and Martha Rosler, the photograph is r evealed,
however, to be not just a sim ple document or index b ut also a co mplex of
cultural codes and beliefs. Roland Barthes helped develop this more nuanced
understanding of photography by considering the image from the perspective of the person who looked at it. Barthes tried to determine how the viewer
would g o a bout under standing t he imag e. I n his c hapter Rhetoric o f t he
Image, Barthes teased out the various messages in a photograph and argued
that viewers of photographs are in fact readers of images.
Hal Foster linked works interested in site beginning in t he 1960s wi th
Minimalism:
These developments constitute a sequence of investigations: first of the
material constituents of the art medium, then of the spatial conditions of
perception, and then of the corporeal bases of this perception shifts marked
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in Minimalist art in the early 1960s through conceptual, performance, body,

and site-specific art in the early 1970s. Soon the institution of art could no
longer be described only in spatial terms . . . it was also a discursive network
ofdifferent practices and institutions, other subjectivities and communities.3
As wi th t he under standing o f t he p hotograph, t he definition of s itespecificity has become more complicated. In the last twenty years, as I noted
in t he introduction, art historians such as M iwon Kwon and James Meyer
have a rgued t hat si tes a re no t sim ply ma terial co nfigurations b ut ca n b e
embedded in language or woven out of the relationships established among
people, objects, places, and disciplines. Green has been seen as one of a generation of artists w ho helped to redefine site. Her installations are not site
specific in t he sense of being built at their place of exhibition and then dismantled once the exhibition is over. Their relation to a site, according to critics
such as Kwon and Meyer, occurs as content.
While the writing on site-specific art has considered the structure of individual works and the social ramifications of the pieces, the viewers relationship to these complex pieces has not been carefully considered. To simplify
an argument made by Krauss, medium is defined in terms of the relationship
between the viewer and the object.4 This chapter argues that viewers engage
with these site-specific works of installation art by reading them. The work
gets viewers interested in t he way they read and the way they make sense
ofthe material world, asking them to pay attention to syntax, as in a photographic sequence, and to reflect on the way meaning is produced by the way
things are framed and arranged. These arrangements have social and political ramifications. Greens work is an example of installation art that positions
the viewer as a cr itical reader who must decode the meaning of images and
objects within their context.
The memory showcased in the installation art of this sort is a materialized
form of memory, b ound to objects, do cuments, and photographic images.
The installations are designed and the images arranged to engage the viewer
in this critical reflection on photography, history, and memory. Greens works
might be seen as engaging in t he politics of representation, or perhaps the
representation of a certain kind of politics. In her work, photographic practices and their ways of framing the world and producing orders of meaning
form the underlying structure of the installations and the films.
Greens works tend to persist in various forms after their initial exhibition,
and hence, there is less em phasis on the importance of the documentation
of her work. Instead, Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts b egins with questions
about the documentation of a site-specific work: Robert Smithsons Partially
Buried. As the narrator says in the videotape Partially Buried Continued, She
wanted to probe the force of photographs and the ways they were bound to
the specificity of time, light, and materiality, yet were more than that. This
means too t hat, rather t han b eing p ositioned outside t he installation in a
photographic archive that documents the installation, Greens work contains
a photographic archive.
The art historian Benjamin Buchloh has examined photographic archives,
comparing preWorld War i i examples of artistic photographic archives to
those that were made after the war. Using the examples of Aby Warburg and
Dada artists, and those associated with the Russian avant-garde, he c laims
that these prewar examples were based on the avant-garde principle of collage, montage, and shock. The juxtaposition of images from different contexts
produces an estranging effect for viewers, causing them to see the images in
a new way. Postwar photographic practice, by contrast, is based on an archival and serial structure. This format has i ts origins in a co unter-model that
developed in the 1920s in Europe. It was photographys ability to record serially and to present contextual and contingent information. In other words,
photography could not only reproduce an almost unlimited number of individuals and objects, but, in addition, could convey an infinite number of different aspects of the same subject.5 The archive format represented a b elief
in the truth of the photographic image that the collage format had, by contrast, invited the viewer to question.
The p ostwar format was a r esponse to consumer culture and had a t endency toward anti-aestheticism. Buchloh uses as his examples Marcel Broodthaers, Gerhard Richter, and especially, Bernd and Hilla Becher. Each artists
work as archive reveals something different. For Richter, it is the rise of consumer culture in conjunction with the proliferation of photographs produced
by both professionals and amateurs. In the Bechers work, it is t he sense of
melancholy attached to t he decline of industrialization, w hich at t he s ame
time su ppresses t he co nnection b etween ind ustry a nd t he H olocaust, t he
bomb, and other historical traumas. For Broodthaerss archives, it is the memory of myths and the revival of a kind of historical consciousness.6 Based on
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a serial structure, these collections are uninflected, straightforward presentations of material seemingly offering no clear opinions or referring in any
way back to the subjectivity of the artist. Buchlohs argument suggests that
these p ostwar archival practices result in b oth collective memory and forgetting.
In An Archival Impulse, Hal Foster argues that a different set of motivations can be found in the work of contemporary artists who use installation
as the format of their archives. Foster describes the works of Tho mas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean as a rchival.7 However, he no tes, rather
than following a careful and systematic approach to their archival practice as
we can see in the postwar work described by Buchloh, these artists are idiosyncratic and are drawn to unusual moments and failures in history. Or the
works ca n celeb rate wi thout ir ony va rious unlik ely her oes a nd her oines.
These artists, Foster argues, seek to make history physically present. He also
distinguishes these artists from the artists-as-curators and from those who
work to critique a t otalizing system or even artists who conceive of the archive as a kind of database. Instead, these artists seek to build something new
from r uins. Foster distinguishes t hese artists f rom t hose t hat Buchloh discusses by noting that these artists utilize a sense of affect and involve themselves personally in t he narratives that their works address. The artists who
do this kind of work are making small alternative archives.
Green, too, is building something from a ruin in Partially Buried in Thre e
Parts. Greens work contradicts the historical order that Buchloh proposes in
his chapter because the works that she produces utilize both a collage strategy and a s erial strategy. Photographs, photographic series, photo archives,
films, and digital databases constitute these installations. But Greens works
break do wn t he hiera rchy o f t hese syst ems o f o rder. Her in stallations a nd
online works allow us to see that each photograph and the object are at the
meeting p lace of multiple connections. These objects fall in to many categories at once, and it is t he viewers work to discover these categories and
connections.
In Greens installations, the viewer is invited to explore the way the meanings of imag es a nd ob jects shift in t he context of filmic a nd p hotographic
sequences a nd a rrangements. The in stallations a re s ometimes centered o n
the individual experience of Rene Green, the African American artist who
has a specific identity and history, but they are also simply collections of in-
formation. Her memories and experiences are organized indifferently as lists

and indexes, but they can also have a narrative structure that guides the viewers interactions with the materials the artist has ga thered. She manages to
produce an archive that includes, or at least can be read, as expressing an artistic sub jectivity. In t his way, her w ork r esembles mo re t hat o f t he a rtists
discussed by Hal Foster, and in fact, both Sam Durant and Tacita Dean, like
Green, have made works about the legacy of Robert Smithson. Greens work
too can be seen as a kind alternative archive, pointing up a series of connections between people, places, and events that have not been recorded in the
history books.
However, Greens work is closer to a database structure something Foster excludes in his a nalysis of the archival impulse. New media theorist Lev
Manovich has focused on the user interface in his discussion of digital databases, and it provides a way to describe how the viewer interacts with Greens
work. The interface between a computer user and the information that the
computer contains takes two forms: as a database a digital archive and
a three-dimensional space that a computer user must navigate.8 The process
of negotiating this space is a linear, potentially narrative structure.
Greens w ork als o o perates as b oth na rrative a nd da tabase. I n G reens
pieces, syntax is co nnected to narrative, which becomes the means for exploring complicated collections of information and is t he me ans by w hich
she asks her vie wers to be critical readers. Green applies this strategy in the
context of her videotapes, which, like her installations, are collections of information, artifacts, and materials as well as stories like the one related at the
beginning of this chapter.
Greens work is distinc t among archival installations in t he way it is concerned with the involvement of the viewer in t he process of reading and in
the process of research in the piece.
Archives
Rene Green is interested in how information is organized and evaluated in
the context of systems of knowledge and memory. This may be because of
her background and training: She did no t receive a degr ee in fine arts but
rather one in lib eral arts and was t hen trained in t he publishing industry.
Green attended the School of the Visual Arts in New York but graduated from
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Wesleyan University in 1981 a nd trained as a p ublishing intern under t he

auspices of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard. She then attended the Whitney
Independent Study Program in 19891990. 9
Greens work in the 1990s consisted of projects in which she exhibited the
research materials she ga thered in her tra vels and work. Greens practice of
including reflection on her travels as an artist connects her to other traveling
artists who chronicled their trips in various ways, such as Robert Smithson.10
Greens series and sequences of photographs and slides in her in stallations
and films suggest Robert Smithsons Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan.
Smithson traveled t o t he Yucatan Peninsula in M exico t o s everal different
sites where he placed mirrors in the earth, in sand, and on the trunks of vinecovered trees; took photographs of these pieces; and then dismantled them.
We le arn of t hese mir ror displacements t hrough a tra velogue he wr ote to
accompany t he photographs. These nonsites, as S mithson called t hem, are
able to circulate through art magazines, exhib itions, and catalogs while the
site is submerged in the Mexican landscape. Combined with Smithsons text,
the photographs point back to something that no longer exists. The text and
photographs s erve as b oth an er ratic archive and a na rrative of t he travel.
Greens work is similar to this piece in many ways.
Greens Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts (19961997) explores the way history a nd memory a re constructed in t he a rchival str ucture in a w ork t hat
seeks to piece together a vanished period of time, the year 1970. When Robert Smithson had made his si te-specific piece Partially Buried Woodshed at
Kent State University that year, Greens mother began attending a workshop
in experimental music at the university. Intrigued by this personal connection to Smithson, the adult Green went back to Kent State to find the remains
of the woodshed and to discover any other connections she may have forgotten. Her access to this time period comes in the form of materials images,
books, stories, objects, and films. These are the materials presented in her
installation.
Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts as it appeared at the Fundaci Antoni Tpies
in 2000 t ook u p t hree r ooms. The first inc luded G reens p hotographs a nd
those from the nonfiction book Kent State by James Michener, which Green
had re-photographed, framed, and hung on the walls. A trio of three lithographs of the philosopher and political activist Angela Davis hung on a third
wall, while a p oster referring to the works original exhibition at Pat Hearn
F I G U R E 2 . 1 R ene Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts, 19961997. S ecession, Vienna.

Photograph by Matthias Herrmann. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.
Gallery in New York was hung on another. A boom box played music from
the 1970s. At the entrance, Green set a table displaying Micheners other fiction books, debris from the woodshed, and an aerial map.
In the second room, Green conjured the atmosphere of the 1970s in t he
form of a co mfortable and fashionable lounging area. The room included a
mock-up o f t he s et o f t he do cumentary Underground, t he 1975 film produced by Haskell Wexler, Mary Lampson, and Emile de An tonio about the
then fugitive political radicals the Weathermen. An afghan blanket decorated
with the phrase The Future Will Be What the People Struggle to Make It
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hung on the wall above a mirror and behind a semicircular, brown velveteen
chair. The r oom als o f eatured p eriod-style, mass-p roduced, met al t ubular
chairs and tables, a macra m wall ha nging, single-channel video mo nitors,
and a listening station with a record player and a collection of albums from
the 1970s.
The order and sequence of objects and images in the installation was significant. The placement of photographs next t o one another or books near
other objects det ermined how one read t he images and objects. And , as a
result, the viewer came to question the order and status of photographs and
objects in Greens installations. In the first room of Greens Partially Buried in
Thr ee Parts, photographs from Micheners book Kent State and Greens color
images confronted each other on opposite walls. They were an abbreviated
version of a photographic archive. Hung in a straight line, the Kent State images were press photographs that appeared in various publications at the time.
The straight line suggested a chronological ordering, but Green disrupted the
chronological sequence found in the book and changed their order at different exhibition sites. Greens photographs, hung in st aggered rows, were all
saturated Cibachromes and depicted her at various sites around the campus
of Kent State looking for the remains of the woodshed. The pictures were
framed elegantly with mats, as fine art prints, in co ntrast to the unmatted
Kent State photographs whose frames cropped the images.
The differences between the photographs seem to point to the difference
between t heir r espective time p eriods a nd ini tial f unctions. G reens p rints
have t he lo ok, ha nging, a nd f raming of contemporary fine a rt imag es. Intended to be aesthetically appealing, they play the role of art photographs.
The press photographs gray, grainy, and lacking mats signal neutral
documents with all the weight of natural fact and would seem to belong in an
archive. The photograph as index is seen to be a product of culture that eludes
the distorting effects of the rhetorical intentions of language or art. As Allan
Sekula des cribes it, t his p erception of t he photograph gives it a primitive
core of meaning, devoid of all cultural determination.11
Photograph as Fragment in a Series

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault describes the relationship
between document and monument. History that is memory seeks to be
F I G U R E 2 . 2 R ene Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts, 19961997. S ecession, Vienna.

Photograph by Matthias Herrmann. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.
straightforward and truthful and to establish continuity from one point in

history to the next. This history undertook to memorize the monuments of
the past, tra nsform t hem into do cuments, and lend sp eech to t hose traces
which, in themselves, are often not verbal.12 In other words, history as memory a ttempted t o co nnect mo numents a nd a rtifacts in to c lear, co ntinuous
narratives. Therefore, Foucault implies, in memo ry, t he monuments of t he
past, which have no mo ral meaning or educational function in t hemselves,
are enlisted in support of these functions. Archaeology, on the other hand, as
a discipline, is a ble to describe monuments but without placing the objects
within a historical narrative or totality. The document, in this sense, is something that is a nalyzed, articulated, and dispersed among various categories.
Foucaults first definition treats the document as a trace t hat must be revivified by the historian and then enlisted for the sake of a moral cause or historical account.13 The second, aligned with archaeology, treats the document as an
already dispersed object, analyzed and divided into many different categories.
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The photograph can participate in both kinds of historical production in an

archive. Greens photographic arrangement can be considered in terms of this
relationship between document and memory.
The proliferation of institutions to collect, document, catalog, and preserve
objects a nd inf ormation in t he ninet eenth a nd tw entieth cen turies distinguish mo dern culture f rom traditional cultures.14 The photograph was a nother way to collect information. It served multiple purposes and eluded strict
categorization from its earliest days. In early assessments of photography, enthusiasts of the period, such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, exult in the cameras
ability to go to places that the viewer may never see in person and to discover
images invisible to the naked eye in the compressed or expanded reaches of
clock-time, as the filmmaker and critic Hollis Frampton puts it. One could
explore a mo ment o f time as o ne w ould exp lore a space . Pho tographerexplorers of time suc h as E adweard Muybridge took t he moment as t heir
field of study. Frampton notes, In much of its early history still photography
might be seen as art trying to purge itself of temporality. The snapshot is an
ideal, infinitely thin, wholly static cross section through a four-dimensional
solid or tesseract of unimaginable intricacy.15
The moment, caught on the surface of a photograph, can be examined like
a slide under a microscope. Because of its stilling effect, the photograph is an
effective means to explore the complexity of the visual and temporal world.
The stillness of the photograph suggests that it is also an agent of death, as
Roland B arthes claims in Camera Lucida. In t his b ook, B arthes returns to
early notions of the photograph where the image is seen almost as a natural
deposit that holds a frozen moment of time. Photographs record the closing
of each instant, the movement of time. Each photograph, as a that has been,
maps and confirms the structure of time as a series of discrete moments. The
photograph represents t he mo dern understanding of time as ra tional and
irreversible.
Photography also presented the possibility of a co mplete visual r ecord. In
the ninet eenth century, Oli ver Wendell Holmes, b ewitched by t he p ower of
photography to document, wrote, There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon . . .
but how many millions of potential negatives have they shed representatives
of billions of pictures. . . . Give us a f ew negatives of a t hing worth s eeing,
taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it. Pull it down
or burn it up, if you please.16
Photographs replace the actual site in Holmess dream. It suggests a possibility of a totalizing structure that can capture every aspect of an object. Photography introduced the p ossibility of creating world-spanning archives of
photographic images that have the same status as other scientific collections.
These co llections o f imag es, suc h as p hotographs o f w orks o f a rt, w ere t o
democratize education, its advocates argued, and increase knowledge. They
also risked the possibility of producing a collection of meaningless historical
details. The development of these technologies of recording and preserving
also prompted anxiety a sense that the materials being saved would be beyond the scope of meaningful memory.17 The proliferation of photographs in
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demanded a kind of order, which was
provided by the archive.
Daguerres contemporaries grasped photographys potential to aid in t he
preservation and study of historic monuments. In his report to the Commission of the Chamber of Deputies in 1839, Dominique Franois Arago spoke
of how useful photography would have been during the expedition to Egypt
thirty years previously. In Aragos report, it is evident that, even before it was
disseminated, photography was a tool in the colonization and study of nonEuropean cultures. In this way, the photograph became another artifact collected in t he a nthropological, hist orical, a nd s cientific exp editions o f t he
nineteenth century. Because of their multiple uses, photographs are objects
that s eem t o b e alr eady a nalyzed, a rticulated, a nd disp ersed a mong ma ny
categories.
The photograph is therefore tied to the archive and the museum collection.
It is one of the objects, along with paintings, sculptures, ethnographic materials, books, and buildings, preserved in large-scale projects of the nineteenth
century in an effort to guard against the loss of tradition and history. During this period of wrenching social and technological change, historical and
preservation societies, such as Englands National Trust, established in 1895,
sprang up in Europe and the United States. Aided by the new recording technology available in the phonograph, the camera, and the movie camera, these
societies undertook projects to record and preserve endangered wild places
and historical sites, such as those of rapidly transforming Paris.18 Secondary
archival a nd memo ry mec hanisms o f t he s ociological dis ciplines a nd t he
museum took over the work of individual memory, storytelling, and traditional practices. The photograph was part of a project inspired by a sense of
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urgency in the face of rapid irreversible changes in this century of increasing

time consciousness.
From the beginning, photography was touted as a type of mnemonic device
that produced artifacts. Portrait photography was p erceived to be materialized memory.19 Louis-Jacques Mand Daguerre, himself, was quite excited by
the possibilities of photographs as indestructible and collectible fragments of
nature: Everyone, with the aid of the Daguerreotype, will make a view of his
castle or country-house: people will form collections of all kinds, which will
be the more precious because art cannot imitate their accuracy and perfection of detail; besides, they are unalterable by light.20 When the photograph
is viewed as evidence, as something replete, it gathers all the old connotations
of natural wonder, magic, tr uth, and fetish, directing attention away from
its fundamental lack of what is t emporally and spatially beyond the frame.
Early on, the photograph was associated with the idea of the fetish as a magical object.21 This fetishistic quality accords with Benjamins description of the
daguerreotype as a relic. The photographic portrait becomes a fetish because
it is perceived as the image of a now-lost person that has been detached and
preserved in ma terial form. The photograph stands for an absent presence.
At the same time, artifacts and photographs are always fragments.22 The
photograph and the artifact correspond in the sense that they are both fragments of the milieu from which they have been taken. Barbara KirshenblattGimblett des cribes t he p rocess o f co llecting a rtifacts as o ne o f defining,
segmenting, and detaching an object from its context. She describes the relationship between artifact and culture as t he relationship of part to whole.
There is a t angible connection to the culture the artifact comes to represent
in t he m useum co llection o r disp lay. B oth a rtifacts a nd p hotographs, lik e
documents, were collected in archives with ambitions of being totalizing displays of knowledge.
However, the photograph is an object that suppresses its inherent lack. Not
only is it an isolated object that fits into your hand, the snapshot, like death,
is a n in stantaneous a bduction o f t he ob ject o ut o f t he w orld in to a nother
world, into another kind of time.23 Christian Metz goes on to identify this
spectral aspect of the photograph with the fetish. The off-frame space is one
of terrifying absence. It is terrifying because it is unframed, uncategorized,
and unincorporated into a discourse of knowledge. In anthropological or ethnographic photographs and collections of artifacts, the photographic series is
employed for comparison purposes. The series is als o employed for the development of a na rrative sequence, without which no basis f or comparison
ofthe details presents itself to the viewer or any means to establish categories
and classifications. In the process of looking at these images, viewers become
aware of themselves looking, as the process becomes the conscious effort to
construct meaning.
Photography Exhibitions
One of the lessons we have learned about photography is t hat the arrangement of the images in a n exhibition context guides o ur reading of the images.24 As an element in a certain discourse, as Allan Sekula has argued in his
essay The Body and the Archive, the image yields the type of information
demanded by the logic of the archive or display itself. In Greens simple hanging of photographs of the Kent State shootings in Partially Buried in Thre e
Parts, there is a n allusion to this history of the way photographs have been
used and displayed. The hanging of the black-and-white press photographs
of May 4 suggests that the photographs be regarded as evidence evidence
that can be used for creating categories and classifications in the context of a
photographic archive. The photographs in Micheners book that hang on the
wall in Partially B uried f unction to support Micheners narrative as s omething that tells the truth.
There has been debate in fine art museums about how photographs should
be exhibited. Should these collections of photographs be exhibited as works
of fine art or as evidence? In the twentieth century, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York has been involved in these battles. One exemplary photography exhibition that uses its images as if they were evidence that tells a story
is The Family of Man, one in a s eries of photography exhibitions organized
beginning in t he 1940s a nd 1950s b y photographer Edward Steichen at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York. Steichens shows treated each print not
as an individual artistic object but rather as pa rt of an overall argument or
story. For the show, the exhibition designer Paul Rudolph chose to hang large,
unframed prints one in front of the other. Sometimes prints were allowed to
overlap one another or were hung cheek by jowl, guiding t he way vie wers
read the images. He clustered photographs with similar themes on the walls
and e ven designed a sho rt cone-shaped st and on w hich photographs were
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positioned. Mary Ann Staniszewski has even suggested that the hanging was
cinematic. The exhibition design was d ynamic, guiding viewers into small
intimate spaces and inviting them to look at prints on ceilings and near the
floor.25 At the same time, the background colors were muted and neutral, as
is typical of modernist exhibition design. The Family of Man exhibition format invited viewers not to contemplate each image but rather to scan several
images at once and determine the connection between them.
And as conveyed by the exhibitions critics, the theme was the fundamental
unity of mankind across differences of class, race, and ethnicity, which was
reinforced by a narrative structure and even mimicked the design of the illustrated weekly magazines such as Life, which were popular in the 1930s and
1940s. As viewers walked through the exhibition, they followed a dramatized
story of love, birth, family, work, and death in which conflicts and differences
are resolved. Composed of photographs made by not only fine art photographers but also photojournalists and others, the exhibition was based on the
notion that photographs tell the truth, as expressed in Steichens essay at the
beginning of the exhibition catalog, in which he describes the exhibition as a
kind of mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.26
What the viewer is able to read in a photograph is conditioned by culture
and history.27 In his dis cussion of photographic connotation, B arthes suggests that photographs are evocative because of the way they produce meaning. The f rame is a n ess ential pa rt o f t he p roduction o f me aning. Ob jects
depicted in photographs induce the associations but do not signify much in
isolation. These rootless fragments can stand for anything. In trying to secure
their significance, the viewer seeks connections between the images, moving
across the rows of photographs, linking together the fragments. Her instinct
is to develop a la rger and larger field of comparison, a co ntext, in o rder to
limit the possible field of meanings in the group of photographs. But even at
this level, the significance of these fragments is uncertain and the process
of s eeing b ecomes a co nscious o ne o f st udying a nd p uzzle s olving. I n t he
photographs from the Michener novel in Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts, the
viewer tries to discern the narrative of the events of May 4, 1970.
Greens fine art Cibachromes on the facing wall are part of a different kind
of discourse: the photograph as fine art. These images are hung in a traditional museum style so that they can be evaluated in terms of aesthetic criteria. Museum discourse applies various frames to objects in order to abstract
them from their original contexts. According to Svetlana Alpers, The taste
for isolating, this kind of attentive looking at crafted objects, is as peculiar to
our c ulture as is t he m useum as a space o r in stitution w here t he ac tivity
takes place.28 The isolation of the object parallels the photographic frame. In
Alperss statement, it is the frame of visual interest. This is part of the ideology of seeing, to quote Jennifer Gonzlez, and, unexamined, remains embedded in the communications and workings of the museum.29
The treatment of the photograph as an object of fine art was epitomized
by many of the photography exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art by
the curator John Szarkowski in the 1960s. Derived from Alexander Dorners
spare, mo dern in stallation design s a t t he H anover L andesmuseum in t he
1920s, Szarkowskis installation design for his exhibitions imparted his opinion about the fine art status of photography.30 In these exhibitions, the prints
were matted, framed, and hung in rows with a liberal amount of space around
each. Even photographs that were not originally conceived as fine art, such as
Timothy OSullivans photographs from survey expeditions to the West, were
hung in the same manner. The hanging invited viewers to attend to the aesthetic quality of each individual print. This was a design that was also typical
for the painting galleries in the Museum of Modern Art for many decades.
In Greens hanging, two competing forms of the exhibition and display of
photographs are presented: the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic.31
In the context of a newspaper or book, the viewer might not pay attention
to how t he imag es w ere f ramed a nd li t o r t o t he p hotographers c hoice o f
subject matter but rather lo ok t hrough t hem for information. However, as
Walter Benjamin noted, every document of history holds a set of hidden social relations that it is necessary to expose. Denaturalizing and defetishizing the photograph begins by placing it within its historical context.32 First,
itis necess ary to understand t hat a p hotograph do es not have an intrinsic
meaning. Allan Sekula describes the photograph as something that is always
snatched up by a mo tivated discourse. The process of critique proceeds by
discovering the historical discourse by which the photograph was snatched
and analyzing its politics and their manifestation in readings of the image. As
work from the 1970s o n the problem of documentary photography argued,
the documentary photograph underwrites and supports whatever reading is
given to it by the discourse into which it is incorporated. The photograph can
be analyzed to reveal the conflicting discourses that inscribe it. But this type
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of analysis can take place only after the truth value of the photograph has
been called into question.
Greens hanging of photographs asks us to engage in this type of inquiry.
Italludes to the way the notion of document has b een complicated since
the 1970s, a nd we can see a similar tendency in t he use of photographs by
other artists such as Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, and Matthew Buckingham. In
Greens installation, it is obvious that the viewer is removed, by many layers
of material, from the original event represented, as well as the original context of t he recording. This naturally le ads t he vie wer to question t he story
being told by this sequence of images of the events leading up to the Kent
State shootings. This critical awareness is encouraged throughout the various
elements of Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts.
This form of inquiry about the past is made possible by the materialization
of memory in the form of photographs and recordings. In Partially Buried in
Thr ee Parts, the framed photographs and fragments from Robert Smithsons
woodshed allude to a history and culture of preservation and recording. The
objects and images are materialized memory. All of the materials in t he installation a nd t he a rtists memo ry a re t hreaded t hrough ob jects t hat ha ve
been mass produced or reproduced by these recording technologies. The representation of time has altered since those salvage projects were begun in the
nineteenth century. Greens work perhaps helps to deal with the anxiety of a
culture that tries to save so much of the past.
The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the
epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of near
and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe,
when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through
time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own
skein.33
It is t he twentieth-century version of t hese same recording technologies

that have provided the materials for Greens installation but also connect to
the childhood memory in the work. These images, incidents, and objects are
part of a network. This quotation from Foucault is also suggestive in terms of
Greens work on particular sites. The artists assemblage of a material archive
connects sites as disparate as Korea and Ohio in both time and space. Thes e
sites have been connected in a network through these objects, materials, and
photographs. For instance, the music played by neighboring kids belongs to

the general category of 1970s popular music. And each record in itself is only
one of a vast collection of identical Jackson 5 and Sly Stone vinyl records that
have b een p roduced. The m usic als o r efers t o a g enre o f American p op
music, which has i ts own history and cultural connotations in t he United
States in the 1970s. The record is also connected to a vast marketing industry
that promotes music from the 1970s as nost algia. A single object, such as a
vinyl l p, pressed in 1970, is a complex historical object located in a network
of relationships.
Green has stated that her interest in recording devices was inspired by her
father, who worked in electronic engineering and was also an avid photographer. A s a y oung c hild, she b egan t aking p hotographs wi th a n I nstamatic
camera and recording sound with an Aiwa reel-to-reel tape recorder. Thes e
interests are reflected in t he connection b etween t he materials in Partially
Buried and the personal memory that is related.34 The t v news of the shootings at Kent State connects to newspaper and television accounts across the
country of the events, which in turn informed James Micheners narrative in
the book Kent State. These accounts have now become recordings, video and
film tapes, and archival material. The broadcast images are now part of a series of images shot by camerapersons and photographers at Kent State. Thes e
snapshots belong to a series of identical reproductions in papers and books
around the world.
In t he video Partially B uried C ontinued, G reen underlines t he fac t t hat
these images have been reproduced in a variety of contexts by filming a slide
as it is projected on the living-room wall. It also occurs in Greens filming of
hands flipping through books with photographs or in the frequent panning
over photographs. In this way, by using this collage structure, Green questions
the authority of the original context and discourse in w hich the image was
placed by showing that the image can be placed in several categories at once:
representation, do cumentation, art, history, nost algia, mass-media imag es,
and personal memory.
Archival Art
Archival installations could be said to fall out of the photo conceptual practices of individuals such as Hollis Frampton and Sol LeWitt in the 1960s, as
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well as the work of Marcel Broodthaers, whose Muse dart moderne de la ville
is usually cited as a n early example of archival work that questions the assumptions and precepts of the museum. These strategies have been particularly useful for artists who are interested in questioning how we understand
memory and how history is p roduced. For artists of color or of ethnicities
whose histories have been distorted, suppressed, or exploited, these are important practices, as Jennifer Gonzlez has cogently demonstrated.35
Some works of this sort question categories and hierarchies produced in
various disciplines from anthropology to history. Fred Wilsons most critically discussed work Mining the Museum in 1992 at the Maryland Historical
Society is the quintessential example. The work in that exhibition was to bring
to the surface an African American history that was conspicuously absent in
the museum prior to Wilsons arrival. At the Seattle Art Museum, for the exhibition Mixed Metaphors, he performed another kind of intervention in the
Egyptian section of the museum. In a small , vertical wall-mounted display
case, Wilson exhibited an arrangement of traditional African headrests. The
arrangement co nforms t o t he exp ected f ormat o f a n et hnographic disp lay
where many examples are housed in a g lass case for comparison.36 Because
the forms of the headrests are all very similar, Wilson was able to compose an
arrangement based on repetition and variation within a s quare format. He
surrounds a la rge, b right ala baster he adrest wi th f our da rk, w ooden o nes.
Thes e shifting categories based on form create a unity of repetition and difference. The shapes form a unified, abstract composition. The stated purpose
of the display is to demonstrate the mutual influence of styles of headrests in
the continent of Africa, including the culture in Egypt of which the alabaster
headrest is a n exa mple. The ca tegories a nd me anings t hat a re hig hlighted
inWilsons work raise questions about how institutions organize knowledge
and objects.
Mark Dions work is als o an archival practice that is r esearch based and
focuses on specific sites, their histories, and their ecologies. In New England
Digs (2001), Dion and a group of volunteers dug at three different sites near
Brockton and New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Providence, Rhode Island.
The resulting materials, ranging from buttons to antique marbles, were then
displayed in wooden cases according to not a scientific classification but
other criteria instead, such as color or material. Like Wilson and Green, Dion
encourages his viewers to question the systems of knowledge and ordering by
which he or any other institution or authority might frame objects. He takes

as his inspiration the cabinet of curiosity and the notion of the dilettante or
amateur s cientist. Karsten B otts work One of Each (1993) co mes f rom his
Archive of C ontemporary History an ongoing project whereby he co llects
everyday objects, cataloging and storing them and is a nother form of archival installation. This is a p roject that because of its overwhelming scale
essentially renders the effort to collect, categorize, and classify meaningless.
He brings out specific parts of the collection for exhibitions, organizing the
objects in various ways. David Bunn makes pieces using the discarded card
catalog of the Los Angeles Public Library. The work consists of found language and poetry, produced by arranging the cards to make sentences or bits
of verse. In this work, sequence and syntax are literally the structure of the
work because the material derives from a system of categorization.
The Center for Land Use Interpretation (c l u i) based in Los Angeles gathers and displays information about certain aspects of land use in the United
States and other countries. Their project Urban Crude: The Oil F ields of the
Los Angeles Basin is a tour of active oil fields in t he city of Los Angeles. The
project provides maps and photographs with captions that give information
about these sites. The project currently has a w ebsite but also existed as a n
exhibit. The work of the c l u i is archival and based on the display of information, but the overall goal of the group is to interpret and give a historical context to the interventions in the land. The groups work epitomizes an archival
installation practice.
The s econd typ e o f in stallation p ractice I call p hotographic in stallation,
and it often includes still photographs installed in a n exhibition space in a
manner t hat enco urages r eflection o n ho w imag es a nd la nguage acq uire
meaning. They use the strategies of position, juxtaposition, and shock, as in
avant-garde collage. L ike archival installations, t hese works are s ometimes
site sp ecific or site focused, but unlike archival installations, w hich have a
flexibility of form, photographic installations are sensitive to the manner in
which t hey a re h ung a nd t he s equence in w hich e ach indi vidual imag e is
seen. These works ultimately have their origin in the photo practices of artists
such as John Baldessari with his work from the Rooms exhibition or of Hans
Haacke with his work Shapolsky et al, which was to be displayed at the Guggenheim Museum in 1971. These installations of photographs focus on the
series and sequence of photographic images and the ideological function of
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captions. They tend to use the conceptual practice of combining image and
text, using the sequence of images to produce meaning.
This category could include the work of Adrian Piper, Louise Lawler, and
even Cindy Sherman in the Artists Space exhibition in 1978. Piper and Lawler continue to make work that responds to the literal and figurative context
of photographic display. Lawler has made subsequent works that responded
to the context, asking the viewer to think about the meaning of the images
and the objects displayed in t he images. In 1982, a t Metro Pictures, for instance, Lawler put together an exhibition of artists who were all part of Metro
Pictures. She then titled the installation Arranged by Louise Lawler, making
the installation her o wn work. In a do ubling of the activity of the galler y,
Lawler calls into question the gallerys choices and exclusions. Another different manifestation of this might be Barbara Krugers room-sized installations of images and text at Mary Boone Gallery. In that installation, which
took place in t hree different exhibitions between 1989 a nd the early 1990s,
the walls were covered with text and images that the viewer was expected to
read. Krugers work in t his project produced an installation that one could
literally read but that also responded to a certain extent to the viewers position in the room.
Another group includes works that place photographs and text in a na rrative or linear sequence. Carrie Mae Weemss From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (19951996) is an installation of thirty-three archival photographs, tinted red, depicting men and women of African descent framed in
black, round frames. Each image has a text commenting on the image or the
experience of the individual in the photograph. Some are slaves or victims of
lynching, and others are musicians and writers. The text and images respond
to each other and must be read in a sequence. The rhetorical and emotional
power of the work comes from the order in which the images are read. This
piece works to undo t he objectifying aspect of these pictures of people of
African descent.
Douglas B laus w orks co mprise a rchives o f r eproductions o f pa intings,
photographs, and other kinds of images. In these works, Blau knits together
a story based on the categorization of a group of images. The images are small
and hung cheek by jowl in a manner to get the viewer to read from one image
to the next. His work is similar in many ways to both Greens installations and
some of Fred Wilsons, such as a series developed from the photo archives of
the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (j jd c ) in N ew York in

1999 for the exhibition To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive. The archive
photographs of H r r R and H pe were taken to record the history of the jjd c
in ac tion around t he w orld. Wilson c hose a s eries of imag es and covered
them with matte board, leaving only a small portion of them visible. In the
remainder of the sixty imag es, Wilson denies t he viewer the context of the
fragment. The photographs are arranged on three walls in grids of 4 by 5 inch
matted and framed images. Only small segments of each photograph are revealed in slits and squares. The structure of the project is an invitation to the
viewer to make sense of a series of fragments. Photographic installations of
this sort are about making sense of a group of visual fragments.
Matthew Buckinghams The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002
c.e. takes the form of a timeline focused on the Mt. Rushmore monument in
South Dakota. The timeline extends into the prehistoric past and far into the
future, when the famous presidential faces have eroded from the rock. Across
the timeline, the viewer learns of the political deception played on the Native
Americans and the social context of the monument. It ends wi th a photograph of the eroded monument five hundred thousand years in the future.
The timeline raises questions about the history of the monument by framing
it in a different way, especially in the context of Native American history. Each
of t hese a rtists a nd co llectives us es a n a rchival stra tegy t o ra ise q uestions
about how information is produced, how history is written, and how subaltern identities are framed and positioned within contemporary culture.
The Serial and Syntactical Structure of Greens Work

In addi tion t o t he K ent S tate p hotos, t he first ro om of Partially B uried i n
Thr ee Parts inc luded a tr io o f li thographs o f t he p hilosopher a nd p olitical
activist Angela Davis. The first lithograph is t he cover of a 1970 Life magazine, w hich featured her in volvement with t he Black Panthers. The photograph catches her in a moment in court when her head is slightly bowed, and
her eyes are cast downward, as if she is contrite. She sports her natural hairstyle, which indicates her commitment to black radical politics. The caption
reads The Making of a Fugitive: Wanted by the fbi Angela Davis. The
photograph and t he caption s eem to promise a girl-g one-wrong magazine
story. But the next lithograph of the series juxtaposes an image of Davis in a
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classical-style portrait with the Marxist philosopher Theodor Adorno with

whom she st udied in G ermany. Daviss image in t his context connotes not
young regretful outlaw but an intellectual whose political position is supported by a hist ory of radical p olitical p hilosophy. In t he final lithograph,
however, Daviss image has dropped out, and what remains is the hairstyle. It
is a 1990s fashion advertisement with the words Afro Power, which features
young models with the same hairstyle. The notion of outlaw and radicalism
is being used to sell clothing. The image has ossified into pure connotation.
As critics such as Brian Wallis have noted, the lithographs seem to tell a story
of dec line. Ro land B arthes demo nstrated t hat c ultural co nnotations a nd
codes supplied by t v shows and t he mass media co lonize photographs s o
that the image becomes a collection of cultural signs. The specificity and urgency of the historical moment when the shutter clicked is replaced by something else.
In the context of Greens installation, however, as ca n be seen in G reens
other arrangements of images, the trio of lithographs connected to Angela
Davis need not be read in one direction as a na rrative of tragic decline into
hollow connotation. We can read the order in reverse, from the advertising
image of the natural hairstyle to the original context for that connotation,
which is the life and activism of Angela Davis. For, in fact, when read in this
way, t he connotation t hat accr ues to t he hairstyle in t he 1990s ad , as hi p,
edgy, and defiant, spins the original reading of the Life magazine imag e of
Davis as def eated and on the run. A s ense of Davis as a hist oric heroine is
reawakened. The p iece sug gests t hat nei ther t he a ffective a nd a ssociative
aspects of these images the historical nor their structural relationships
should take precedence in our consideration of them. The lithographs form a
series that can be read in either direction, and the sequence allows us to see
that the images that can fall into many categories at once.
The nonhierarchical and serial nature of Greens work recalls the structure
of a Minimalist or conceptual work of art, based on a series of units, which
Robert Morris des cribes in Notes o n S culpture as sets, s eries, mo dules,
and simple systems.37 Donald Judd favored the compositional strategy of the
repetition of identical units because it was a me ans of avoiding work based
on subjective choices or the balance of separate parts. Green has als o mentioned her interest in S ol LeWitts method of producing works by objective
logical systems. But unlike the Minimalist cube, Greens unit, the photograph
F I G U R E 2 . 3 M arion Faller (1941) and Hollis Frampton (19361984), # 782 Apple

Advancing [var. Northern Spy], from Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion, 1975.
Gelatin silver print, 71/8 in. x 12 7/16 (18.1 cm x 31.59 cm). Gift of Frank Stella (PA 1954).
Black-and-white photograph Marion Faller. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover,
Massachusetts, 1990.52.16.
or the frame of film, has historical or narrative content and is shot through
with associations. It is illusionistic, as Hollis Frampton would say.
Framptons photographic practice also shares the basic structure of a Minimalist work of art. Frampton turned to photography and pop art in the 1960s
in the midst of abstract, anti-illusionist art, because they harbored illusionism, la nguage, a nd exp lorations o f visual syn tax a nd h umor.38 Fr ampton
made s eries of photographs employing a mo dular format in his E adweard
Muybridgeinfluenced p hotography. H is s eries, ho wever, suc h as Sixteen
Studies from Vegetable Locomotion from 1975, wi th titles such as Squashes
Vacillating or Mature Radishes Bathing, were actually funny.
A similar project from the early 1970s, A Visitation of Insomnia was a series
of photographs taken of a nude woman arriving, performing exercises, and
leaving. The series was divided into twenty-four sections, the same number
of frames in one second of film. Framptons image lightens the seriousness of
these images, w hich in t heir nineteenth-century context demonstrated t he
triumph of rational constructions of time.
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The serial structure and interest in n umerical and alphabetical order recurs in Framptons films. Frampton made the single image a unit in a structure whose order is established by the relationships between the images of his
films and the structure of the film itself. Frampton was interested in producing a photographic/filmic project as extensive and encyclopedic as the world.
His ambition is reminiscent of Oliver Wendell Holmess dreams of a totalizing p hotographic a rchive. F rampton tr ied t o r ealize his ide a o f a n in finite
cinema in his epic thirty-six-hour film Magellan. Nora Alter points to the fact
that Green in her videos also seems to have the goal of producing a total cinema. Green quotes Frampton in several places in her work, and she showed
his film Nostalgia in the film series she organized for the exhibition Between
and Including in 1999 in Vienna.
Frampton the filmmaker conceived of his films as f ragments or as a v ocabulary of images organized, like Sol LeWitts work, according to random
sequences and series based on different categories. He also conceived of his
films as archives of images but organized in playful and arbitrary orders. In
Hollis Framptons 1971 film Nostalgia, the camera focuses on a b urner on
which a p hotograph is p laced and reduced to cinders. As t he photograph
burns, a voice describes a scene that the viewer cannot see, relating interesting a necdotes a bout i t. A s t he film co ntinues, t he vie wer r ealizes t hat t he
narrator is describing photographs not the photograph that is burning but
rather the next photograph in the series to be burned.39 Important information and stories about the circumstances of the shot are being related before
viewers can even see the image, prompting them, once they see the image, to
scramble to remember what the narrator said about it as it disappears. Thes e
images are photographs taken by Hollis Frampton before he became a filmmaker. Frampton destroys his photographic archive to produce a filmic one,
while at the same time pointing to the gap between experience and representation, and photograph and memory.
Journeys through Archives: Some Chance Operations

She tries to remain calm in the face of the disorder of the project. Reading film
encyclopedias and surviving film stills, she also reads about alphabets, as a memory
device and order, AZ over and over, 26 locations to store everything.
Some Chance Operations
Mary Ann Doane describes film as an archive. In it, she writes, images are
stored, time itself is stored.40 Considering Greens videos as a s ort of filmic
archive reveals a key connection between her installations and videos. Both
involve iden tification wi th a p rotagonist a nd t he p ractice o f walkin g. The
protagonist acts as the point of connection between the viewer and the complex archival structure of the film, represented in Some Chance Operations
bythe complexity of the city of Naples. In the video Some Chance Operations, the filmmaker seems to be searching for order in the midst of an everexpanding cache of images and anecdotes. The pretext for the film was t he
artists jo urney t o Naples t o uncover memories of t he now-forgotten e arly
twentieth-century Neapolitan silent filmmaker Elvira Notari. Green was interested in the ephemerality of film as an archival medium exemplified by the
fact that the film scholar Giuliana Bruno was a ble to uncover only a sin gle
complete film by Notari, some scripts, and a f ew film stills.41 In her videotape, Green explored the possibility that Neapolitans might remember Notari. Some Chance Operations is made of found footage; films shot in Super 8;
texts from writers such as Walter Benjamin, Hollis Frampton, and Eduardo
Cadava; and interview sequences that tell a story of looking for evidence of
Elvira Notari. The film itself utilizes collage and serial structures.
Green creates a protagonist for the viewer to follow through Naples, a Neapolitan woman with red hair named Clara, who takes the place of the filmmaker herself and who navigates the complex space of Naples. Because Green
shuns a single, coherent plot line, the viewer is forced to pay attention to the
order and sequence of the images, texts, and other information in t he film,
prompting a desire to rewind the tape and retrace the threads that are lost
tomemory as the film proceeds. The intricate quality of Greens films rhymes
the avant-garde films of other artists, of an older generation, such as Frampton, Chris Marker, and Yvonne Rainer.
Some Chance Operations has both structural elements and image sequences
similar to Rainers Journeys from Berlin. Both films were inspired by Walter
Benjamins meditations on memory, artistic production, and political action.
Journeys from Berlin interweaves the dialogs of three different groups of people: a woman with her psychoanalyst, a couple at home discussing political
activism, and an adolescent girl with her diary. The woman (Annette Michelson) with her psychoanalyst recalls her life in disjointed, disconnected phrases
and images. At times, her difficult-to-follow recollections are quotations from
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political writings or poetry. Although the couples conversation is easy to follow, we can only hear them making meals or drawing baths as they recall the
history of radical p olitical action in E urope. As they talk, the camera pans
over a typical fireplace mantle of a middle-class home on which rest framed
pictures, as well as piles of cold spaghetti, handguns, and pliers. We never see
the teenage girl. Instead, she reads her diary entries as the camera films cities
and ruins from the air. Each characters dialog is a collage of quotations that
is adopted or inserted into a personal situation.42
Greens videotape is less fragmented and much shorter than Rainers film,
but both have silent sequences in which only quotations flash on the screen.
They both use a va riety of film stocks that help create a visual rh ythm and
collage structure in each film. Both have images of the ruins of Pompeii and
interviews psychoanalytic sessions in Journeys where p eople a re q uestioned about their experiences and memories, as well as shots of people walking through city streets.
Journeys from Berlin is built around and titled after a quotation in Walter
Benjamins chapter Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia, which Rainer surreptitiously inserts as part of one of the characters
own memories in t he film. [Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert]
everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys (railways
are beginning to age), on godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian
quarters of great cities, in the first glance through a rain-blurred window of a
new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action.43
The same sense of lonely journeying occurs in Greens Partially Buried and
Partially Buried C ontinued. A b ody walks t he streets of t hese cities. In s equences produced in neig hborhoods in Cle veland and t he streets of S eoul
and Kwangju, the camera acts as an eye filming the streets, electric signs, and
buildings. This body must read the space and make sense of it. In an opening
sequence in the film Some Chance Operations (1999), t he narrator speaking
on behalf of the filmmaker explains,
Shed read a book called Streetwalking on a Ruined Map about Elvira Notari
and her city films. The title reminded her of her own walks and circuitous
searches in different cities. The ruined map made her think of places shed
triedto visit where the map no longer coincided to the locations in the
present. Shed spent time walking daily in a crumbling European seaside city
searching for old maps of travel routes and for places reconfigured many times
before shed arrived. . . . Her voyage became symbolic, a quirky meditation
among tourists. The distance between the times and locations always seemed
in excess of her goals. The goals themselves seemed arbitrary, erratic. Based
onchance.44
Although th e film has a dis connected str ucture, t he p rotagonist is t he

thread t hat wends its way t hrough Some Chance O perations. As she walks
through the streets of Naples, each of her enco unters flashes on the screen
inthe form of images. In both Journeys from Berlin and Some Chance Operations, the viewer is invited to identify with a protagonist as a way of navigating t hrough t he p roliferation o f ra ndom imag es, q uotations, a nd s ounds.
Green describes herself as an avid pedestrian.45 Walking forms a significant
part of her r esearch process, and its do cumentation in t he form of photographs and videotapes appears in many of Greens installations. Thes e range
from Import/Export Funk Office, which includes a video of the streets of Manhattan at night, to the film Some Chance Operations. The documentation of
Greens wandering in videos and photographs depicts the artist walking and
sometimes filming the streets of cities in Europe and Asia from moving cars.
Greens videos, which trace journeys through various localities, recall another archival film: Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertovs 1928 Man with a Movie
Camera. In this film, the protagonist films various things while wandering in
Odessa, Russia. According to Lev Manovich, Its subject is t he filmmakers
struggle to reveal (social) structure among the multitude of observed phenomena. Its project is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology that has
but one tool perception.46 Vertov gathered archival material of life in this
city with his movie camera and assembled it to produce the film. This film is
an archive, but it also tells the story of its own making, including sequences
depicting Vertovs partner, Elizaveta Svilova, sorting and editing reels of film
that will be used in the final cut. Manovich points to this as an example of a
film that is at the intersection of the database and the narrative film.
Greens videos a re simila rly co mplex a nd s elf-reflexive. The filmmakerartist is one of the protagonists with whom we, as viewers, are invited to identify as we watch the film. There are three characters in this film that guide the
viewer. The visible character, the filmmakers double, Clara, is the figure we
follow through the streets. The camera assumes Claras point of view, taking
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in random shots of street life in Naples: crowds, the marble Galleria, the port,
and the fish market, as she/t he camera moves through the city. We are also
made aware of the filmmaker, who one assumes to be behind the camera and
whose experiences conceiving and making the film a male na rrator relates.
In Greens installation work, the viewer also encounters the installation by
strolling and reading, and this relationship of viewer to installation is figured
in her films by the wandering and searching of the protagonist. In Greens
videos, it is t he body moving through the streets that links t he films to the
installations. The movement of Claras body through the streets also signifies
the process of navigating through a collection of information. This is the same
process that the artist performed in producing her archive-like installations.
The protagonist in the film connects the filmmaker-artist and the viewer who
moves her body around and reads in Greens archival installations.
The Examination of Document, Memory,

and History in Partially BuriedContinued
The final darkened room in Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts held video projections of Greens videos Partially Buried Continued and Slides of Korea. Thes e
videos derive from Greens childhood experience of watching her fathers slide
show of p hotographs he t ook in K orea during t he Korean War.47 Partially
Buried Continued opens with a familiar but now-outmoded private ritual. We
hear the whir of a slide p rojector as t he image of a bird flying in a b lue sky
comes into focus. The slides click and change while a narrators voice explains
the circumstances of this scene. This slide show consists of snapshots that the
artists father took during the Korean War. As a young girl, it was the artists
first encounter with Korea. She has now been invited decades later to make
asite-specific work for a b iennial there, in t he city of Kwangju, and out of
curiosity she revisits the images and her fathers stories. Along with the familiar sounds of the slide projector, she has recorded her fathers voice as he tells
the story of his deployment to Korea. We see her father in swim trunks, arms
outstretched o n a T exas b each. We s ee t he dec k o f a mili tary shi p at s ea,
streets in do wntown Seoul, and the dusty, dr y air force base where planes
landed to refuel and where the artists plane lands some forty-odd years later.
The videotape is a travelogue of sorts, composed as a montage, documenting the artists trip and her encounters with evidence of the past. The video
revolves around her fa thers slide sho w and a s cene w here t he artist and a
young Korean woman look at a book of photographs of a deadly 1980 protest
in Kwangju. These sequences are interspersed with historical footage of 1960s
protests in Berlin and Paris, still shots of Robert Smithsons and other artists
work in the 1970s, and various scenes of modern-day Kwangju. Thr oughout,
an anonymous narrator tells us o f the artists thoughts about war, memory,
and memorials. Partially Buried in Thre e Parts and Partially Buried Continued
could be read as a way of connecting with public history via private memories. Both the installation and the videotape, as heterotopias, are built around
correspondences between different times and places. And the video uses the
strategies of collage and serial structure to raise questions about the relationship among these places and the memories of them.
The photograph plays a central role in this work as well. Green was interested in S mithsons Partially Buried Woodshed in pa rt because it is a w ork
known through photos.48 As I suggested at the outset, Greens work is in part
a response to questions about the documentation of an earlier site-specific
work and its meaning. Later in the sequence of the videotape Partially Buried
Continued, when the artist looks at the book of images taken during the 1980
protest in Kwangju, the narrator explains her interest in the photograph: She
wanted to probe the force of photographs and the ways they were bound to
the specificity of time, light, and materiality, yet were more than that. B ecause the private ritual of the family slide show is now outmoded, it can be
recontextualized within the broader scope of history. And because it was such
a widespread format, the slide show can establish connections among different social groups and photographic practices. The slide show is also a kind of
small-scale archive, and the way it is showcased in this film demonstrates the
ways in which Greens work asks us to question archival structures.
The family slide show in Partially Buried Continued provides another example of Greens critical practice in relation to photography and is an example of the use of a serial structure in her work. Green also uses the pleasure of
the family slide sho w to connect with her vie wers and to engage them in a
process of critical comparison that draws together the production of history,
the limits of Greens site-specific art practice, and finally, the production of
Greens own artistic subjectivity in her w ork. In this procedure of comparison, the strict divisions between historical document and personal memory,
site and its representation, and autobiography and fiction are broken down.
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The images in the slide show, like the other images in Partially Buried, belong
in many categories at once.
Darsie Alexander notes that the slide show, consisting of individual images
shown in seq uence, bridges the gap between still photography and film. 49
Slide shows were attractive to artists in t he late 1960s b ecause, unlike film,
the sequences could be edited at any time. In a slide sho w, there can always
be one more slide. It brings to mind Hollis Framptons description of the relationship between photographs and film. He writes, There is nothing in the
structural logic of the cinema filmstrip that precludes sequestering any single
image. A still photograph is simply an isolated frame taken out of the infinite
cinema.50 At the same time, one could argue that the common format of the
photograph connects images taken at any time and any place. The slide show
in G reens video tape, t hen, is a nexus w here different imag es a nd p hotographic practices intersect. As t he format us ed in a rt history slide lec tures
and classrooms, the slide show is a conceptual common space by means of
which it is possible to make comparisons.
Slide Show as Memory

At the same time, the family slide show generates a sense of familiarity and
even identification among viewers who experienced this format, which is becoming a t hing of the past as ma jor photography companies shift to digital
cameras a nd p rojectors. K odak decided t o ce ase t he ma nufacture o f slide
projectors and bulbs in 2004. The slide show now marks a particular moment
in history and has become a site charged with personal memory.
The narrator of Partially Buried Continued describes in vi vid terms how
the artist experienced her fathers slide show as a child.
When Korea was first presented to her, it was in the form of still slide colour
projections. Her father would say that these were taken during the war. He
would describe what was in the image. She would ask the who and where of the
images and he would give her an answer. Consecutive still colour images clicked
one after another, shining on the screen in a dark living room, her fathers voice
linking them together, the images, the distant location, the past and present.
As a child, the slide show was the means by which the artist experienced
both a stra nge place and a dist ant past. The slide sho w fulfills some of the
functions of photography laid out by Dominique Franois Arago in 1839, but

it takes on in the twentieth century the added role of private memory practice. Green said she included the slide show in the videotape because it was
so common in middle-class homes in the 1960s and 1970s. 51 This sequence
in Partially Buried Continued undoubtedly evokes a warm feeling of recognition for many of Greens audience, as a large segment of middle-class families
in the twentieth century had been persuaded by Kodak and other photography companies that it was important to preserve their memories in the form
of still color slide projections.
When Mr. Green bought his Bosley B2 camera in the 1950s, Kodak was in
the midst of a new effort to market color photography in the form of Kodachrome slide film. 52 The introduction of the slide film and the Kodaslide color
transparency projector in t he 1930s was in tended t o increase t he s ales of
snapshot photography equipment. Although the equipment itself required
little skill, after the war the company aggressively educated its consumers via
television ads to photograph the best moments of life, such as exotic travels,
hunting trips, personal milestones, and family time.
The luminous colors of the Kodachrome slide were an important part of its
appeal. The color connected the images that one made at home to the movie
screen, and advertisements where various color processes, such as the Technicolor process in film, had already been introduced. One slide manual from
1962 e ven holds up cinema as a n example to its readers, advising them to
make stories from their slide s equences, complete with title shots. The text
reads, Every Hollywood epic has titles and so should your slide stories.53 In
this way, t he private exp eriences and stories of t he family slide sho w were
connected to other mass media, suc h as mo vies, magazines, a nd television
advertisements, and idealized in t he process. But also, the process of composing narratives or storytelling was part of the practice. In this way, the slide
show fits in well with Greens other works, which have the same structure of
narrative and archive.
Kodaks slide ma nuals were an important part of this process. The company published them to show customers how to produce good pictures using
their products and how to organize a good show. Like the early advocates of
photography, t he representatives of Kodak felt it necess ary to demonstrate
the varied uses of the color slide. The manuals seem to provide the technical
information for any possible subject that an individual would like to photo-
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graph. And the authors emphasize the unique and fresh picture. At the same
time, however, these manuals recommend to their readers what is appropriate to photograph. This contributed to the familiar poses and subject matter
that populate amateur photographs and prompted Pierre Bourdieu to observe
that, to an outsider looking at such pictures, the images depict not uniqueness or individuality but merely social role.54
If the family slide sho w was a wa y of practicing memory, then it was a n
idealized form of family memory. The idealization of experience in the family
snapshot connects it to nostalgia. The sociologist Fred Davis describes nostalgia as a n emotion that envelopes all t hat may have been painful or unattractive about the past in a kind o f fuzzy, redeeming, benign aura.55 The
family slide sho w was o ne of t he r ituals of mo dern consumer c ulture t hat
flourished in the nostalgia produced by the dislocations of modernization. In
its marketing, amateur photography both encouraged and satisfied nostalgic
longing. Based on the notion of an irretrievable but ideal past, according to
Svetlana Boym, the pleasure of nostalgia arises in the sense of identification
that it activates.56 The power of the family snapshot to solidify this sense of
connection was w ell understood by the Kodak Company early in t he companys history. But the sense of longing that characterizes nostalgia did no t
enter into Kodaks advertising until the turn of the twentieth century, according to Nancy Martha West. In her book Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, West
pinpoints a shift in t he co mpanys ad vertising b etween t he 1880s a nd t he
First World War. Initially, West argues, Kodak advertised photography as a
healthy leisure-time activity. However, after 1900, K odak began advertising
photography as a wa y to preserve the fleeting experiences of modern life.57
This marketing approach emerged within the context of a new understanding that the pleasures of a carefree, middle-class childhood are soon over in
modern capitalist culture. The photograph becomes the means by which to
reconnect with these vanished pleasures. At the same time, according to West,
any sug gestion o f de ath, suc h as t he ninet eenth-century p ractice o f p ostmortem photography, was expunged from the photograph itself. Death is only
implied in the framing of the motivation to photograph. In other words, life
is fleeting; take pictures.
West characterizes this evacuation of conflict from the snapshot as an aestheticization of experience and connects it to modern consumer culture. This
aspect o f t he snapshot s eems t o ex clude i t f rom t he r ole o f do cumentary
photograph. Transforming memory into something pleasant and easily consumed, the snapshot as nostalgia takes its place instead alongside other consumer goods that were populating private life and leisure time in the twentieth
century.
History as Representation
As a means of encountering history then, the family slide show seems problematic b ecause t he sna pshot is a n ide alized v ersion o f exp erience co nditioned by mass culture. Greens videotape suggests there is something further
to discover than what is initially offered by these images and the words that
guide our understanding of them. The artist asks herself, what lies b etween
the words and the photos? The notion of the slide show as a common space
where a dialog can take place is reinforced by the serial structure of the videotape in which times, places, and photographic practices are juxtaposed.
The common space created by Greens use of the slide show provides the
critical distance from which to survey the marketing of the slide show itself.
Despite the emphasis on variety, uniqueness, and difference, the images in
slide manuals of the 1950s and 1960s are quite uniform. The individuals depicted are middle-class white people caught in joyful moments. The y could
be the inhabitants of any number of advertisements from those decades. And
Mr. G reens sna pshots lo ok lik e a ny n umber o f vaca tion p hotographs. H e
took pictures of Koreans and their houses and monuments, of his friends and
associates, and of himself. But in t he 1950s, a n image of Mr. Green posing
with white fellow soldiers, arms entwined, was no t yet a ma rketable image.
And as such, it remained in the private realm of the family slide show until it
was released in the historical context provided by the younger Greens video.
In this context, Mr. Greens private snapshots highlight the exclusions of the
ideal images used in marketing amateur snapshot photography in the 1950s.
However, M r. G reens slides a re typ ical o f slide ma nual p hotographs in
other ways. The narrator in the videotape notes that from the artists perspective the war seemed to have been incidental in Mr. Greens images. And there
is little sense of trauma, violence, or conflict in a ny of them. Mr. Green recorded only leisure-time images and relatively happy moments shots of the
units Korean house boys playing soccer, of the air force base when it is still
and empty, or rice paddies on a sunny afternoon. Because these images seem
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FIGURE
2 . 4 R ene Green, Korea Slides, 1997, still. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.
to be familiar vacation photographs, we even read the shots of bombed-out

buildings and a woman squatting among ruins more as tourist photos than
war images. The violence of the war seems quieted in Mr. Greens slides, rendering them material for nostalgia.
In the videotape, the family slide sho w scene mirrors another in w hich
the young Korean woman Hae Sun Kim describes graphic images in a book
about the deadly Kwangju protest in 1980. G reen included Kim in t he film
because she remembered the Kwangju killings from childhood, but like the
Kent State shootings for the artist, she only knew of the events through photographs. Kim was part of a collective of photographers that was documenting t hese killings by g overnment s oldiers in o rder t o keep memory of t he
incident alive. In a dialog with the Kwangju documentary photographs via a
collage structure, the suppressed historical and violent context of Mr. Greens
nostalgic slides resurfaces, revealing their connections to a longer history of
political conflict and oppression in Korea.
In describing her efforts to research the traumatic history of the May 18

protests, Kim says something interesting about memory: The only people
who really know what happened on May 18 w ere there at the time. Thos e
who survived tend to be emotionally subjective rather than objective about
what happened. Documenting what happened will take place after uncovering the truth about it. Kim articulates the suspicion that personal memory
arouses. What is t he status of personal memory in t he practice of history?
How does one negotiate the gap between memory and document? The same
question can be asked of any documentary photograph.
Genealogy
When Rene G reen was wa tching her fa thers slide sho w as a c hild, Robert
Smithson also happened to be making his slide works. Darsie Alexander observes that slide projection did not enter art practice until the late 1960s when
artists, such as D an Graham, Marcel Broodthaers, and Robert Barry, began
using it as a wa y of working through the differences among various media
and as a tool in conceptual art strategies. Alexander suggests that the inspiration to use slide projection may have come from its use in other parts of an
artists life, such as Rob ert Smithson and Nancy Holts salons where fellow
artists showed and discussed their work.
Green included in Partially Buried Continued an image, a slide w ork, of
Smithson setting up a mirror displacement in a compost heap in Dsseldorf,
Germany, in 1969. 58 When asked about the connection between her fathers
slides and Smithsons slide works, Green said it was not direct. Her interest
in Smithson and the history of avant-garde art, she said, is a critical interest.
Slide projection, as a bridge between photography and film, allows artists to
explore temporality, sequence, and duration. However, Green makes a reference to this practice as outmoded.
For Green in t he 1990s, t he slide sho w is t he means by which to explore
time in the form of history and memory, which crosses both the private and
public realms. For this reason, we should regard the inclusion of Smithsons
slide work in the videotape, then, not as a reference to Smithson as a privileged artistic precedent who employed the slide show format but rather as
one exa mple o f ma ny different p hotographic p ractices, inc luding G reens
fathers own practice, that mark the period. The common format of the slide
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show allows a dialog t o be established between the photographs of a w hite

avant-garde artist in t he 1960s a nd a middle-c lass black father and former
soldier from Ohio.
As I noted in the introduction, Craig Owens argued that photography is at
the center of Smithsons relationship of site to nonsite.59 For Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan, Smithson travelled to Mexico in 1969 a nd placed
mirrors in t he earth and on the trunks of vine-covered trees, took photographs o f t hese si ted a rrangements, a nd t hen disma ntled t hem.60 In on e
image, the mirrors, fixed in the earth, reflect the sky, a literal displacement of
sky into earth. Like the mirrors, the photographs frame, crop, and flatten the
visual information they hold. The photographs are the displacements of the
actual sites. Combined with Smithsons text, the photographs point back to
something that no longer exists. The site exists only as representation. In this
sense, the connection with Mr. Greens slide show is clear.
The process of mediation is clarified in Smithsons Hotel Palenque, which is
another set of slides taken with his Instamatic camera during his Mexico trip
that he then exhibited as part of a lecture at the University of Utah in 1972. In
the lecture, Smithson narrates his photos of a partially built but already decaying hotel. He guides his audience through the rooms of the hotel, marveling at hallways and abandoned swimming pools in the enthusiastic tones of
the connoisseur, comparing tile floors and st airways to t he work of Jasper
Johns and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and pointing to the incomplete walls
and partial stairways as an example of de-architecturization. In the process,
he romanticizes what he des cribes as t he Mexican temperament.61 While
documenting the hotel, Smithsons lecture critiques art history or the power
of any academic discourse to interpret the foreign object and the exotic site.
At the same time, Smithson appropriates the Mexican hotel as his own work
of North American avant-garde art.
In a certain sense, Mr. Green also treated his photographs as documents.
He selected subjects in terms of the types of memories he wanted to preserve,
choosing to photograph sites and incidents that, from his p erspective as an
American soldier in Korea, were unusual or interesting. His slide show also
reveals his thorny position as a f oreigner who interprets the Korean culture
from his limited perspective. He expresses admiration for the history of Korea
and the persistence of people in Seoul, but it is his description of the Koreans
reactions to his ca mera that reveals the complexity of his p osition as a f or-
eigner or t ourist. S ometimes, he no tes, Koreans w ould ob ligingly p ose for

him, but other times they would turn their backs or hide because, Mr. Green
tells his daughter, They didnt want you to take pictures of them.
The common format of the slide show as travelogue becomes the means
by which we can draw connections between Smithsons work in the late 1960s
and Mr. Greens snapshots in the 1950s. Mr. Greens snapshots and his stories
are conditioned by both his p osition as a n outsider to Korean culture and
the conventional format of the amateur photograph. We see Korea through
the filters of personal memory and mass culture in the form of conventional
poses and subject matter. In Smithsons slide sho w, we s ee t he diffic ulty of
documentation, interpretation, and authority exaggerated in his p ose as a
critic or historian. These connections b etween t he slide sho ws draw us t o
thematerial context, which is Rene G reens videotape produced in the late
1990s. Green uses this format to make a point about her own position as an
artist in relation to the site of Kwangju.
Greens videotape was made as pa rt of an invitation to t he Kwangju Biennial in 1997. As critics such as Miwon Kwon, James Meyer, and Hal Foster
noted, t he p osition of site-specific artists in a g lobal art market is co mplicated. Asked to participate in exhibitions around the globe and often to produce work that addresses the culture and history of their sites, these artists
are placed in t he p osition of interpreters and historians for t heir art audiences. They are asked to produce knowledge. Partially Buried Continued is a
response to these difficulties. The narrator alerts us to the artists problem as
foreigner in Korea, like her fathers, by noting, Her status was f ragile, relative. She tried to tread softly.
Partially Buried Continued presents itself as do cumentation of the artists
trip to Korea. The photograph as document is read as a source of knowledge.
Green is aware of the authority she assumes w hen she engages in this practice. H owever, t he video tape unco vers ma ny p ossible r eadings o f i ts o wn
material by emphasizing the ambiguity of the photograph in t he context of
the serial structure Green appropriates via the slide show and by the collage
structure produced in her film. In Greens work, visual documents of a deadly
protest in t he 1980s a nd photo-conceptual practices of t he 1960s a re connected to the private memory practices of an African American family. The
implicit juxtaposition of t hese photographic practices and t heir mo des of
presentation trouble the boundaries between memory and document. The
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way the photograph was dispersed among these many categories in the video
Partially Buried Continued parallels the way they are treated in the installation of protest photographs in the first room of Partially Buried.
The tension between the document and the memory is heightened in the
juxtaposition of the photographs of the deadly 1980 protest in Kwangju with
Mr. G reens sna pshots. D escribed b y H ae S un K im, t he imag es f ollow t he
conventions of photojournalism rather than those of the amateur snapshot.
We see them as evidence of a violent event. Placed in a dialog with Mr. Greens
Korea slides, it is clear how much is left out of his more nostalgic images. It
is also clear that the individual memory and social perspective presented in
amateur photography are conditioned by mass media conventions.
But while the subjectivity produced in the photographs is conditioned by
the conventions of amateur photography, the stories that accompany them
reveal overlooked aspects of these histories. It is Mr. Greens personal stories
that illuminate the circumstances of each of the photographs and that draw
their connections to an event that belongs to the realm of public history. In
these photographs and stories, we as vie wers become privy to the personal
experience of this historical event. Where Smithsons narration of his Hotel
Palenque slides emphasized the biased and partial interpretations of his experience of a foreign site, it is the very sort of biased and partial narration in
Mr. Greens personal stories that reveal new perspectives in the history of the
Korean War.
In this dialectical relationship, the photo document loosens the grip of the
subjective identification of its interpreter. As representation in t he form of
photographs, slides, and stories, memory can be analyzed and critiqued. At
the same time, the photograph in the context of the family slide show is permitted to retain its powerful affective and subjective connotations. In this way,
the photograph is co ntinuously decoded and recoded in t he serial and collage structure of the family slide show and the videotape.
The Photograph as Paradigm for Greens Critical Practice

The ambiguity of the photograph in Greens videotape parallels the ambiguity
of the subject in her work. Miwon Kwon criticized site-specific work, such as
Greens, for reintroducing the importance of the author-subject: A nomadic
narrative requires the artist as na rrator-protagonist.62 But Partially Buried
Continued actually opens up the artist-subject and renders its status indeterminate. Unlike Mr. Greens first-hand accounts, an anonymous narrator
with a B ritish accent des cribes t he a rtists exp eriences. G reen is ca reful t o
distinguish herself from the artist here, finally referred to in t he videotape,
although the man in the videotape is her father and the personal history referenced is informed by her personal history. The artist in the videotape is a
persona that loosely mirrors Green herself, and we are never sure if the mirror image is acc urate. L ike t he subjectivity presented in p rivate snapshots,
which is refracted through the conventions of snapshot photography, artistic
subjectivity in this work is presented to us as mediated only in the form of
representation. This pa rallels p erhaps Amelia J oness a rguments a bout t he
presence of the artists body in performance art.
The same is true of the photograph. Connected by the common format of
the slide show, the images produced by a black soldier in Korea in the 1950s,
a white avant-garde artist in the 1960s, a black site-specific artist in the 1990s,
and by implication ours are brought together in a dialog wi th images used
inmass culture and knowledge disciplines. In Greens videotape, the private
snapshot becomes one among many recording practices. Placed in the montage str ucture of t he video, we s ee t he photograph as do cument, memory,
and fiction.
The slide show sequence in Partially Buried Continued is the metaphor for
Greens b roader cr itical p ractice, as w e a re made a ware t hat w e enco unter
these sites, histories, and subjects only as r epresentations. Using the strategies of collage and serial structures, the video foregrounds the processes by
which history is co nveyed while drawing our attention to the processes by
which site is r epresented via p hotographs. The nost algic ple asure we no w
derive from the slide show in Greens video enables us as viewers to identify
with these pictures and stories and thus engage in a critical reflection on the
production and consumption of history and memory.
The Photograph as Link in Code: Survey

Greens recent work titled Code: Survey demonstrates how the structures of
collage and series are used in the context of a digital database to raise questions about the meaning of photographs and other forms of documentation.
Green has made other digital archives. The first was for her installation Import/
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FIGURE
2 . 5 R ene Green, Code: Survey, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Free Agent Media.
Export Funk Office, which was put together while Green was teaching at the
Academy of Fine Ar ts in Vienna. Code: Survey (figure 2.5) f rom 2006 was
commissioned by the State of California and takes the form of a collection of
images, texts, and recordings of memories and experiences associated with
expressways in California.63
Code: Survey clarifies that the photograph, in G reens work, is a co mplex
object whose meaning changes based on the words attached to it or the way
it is framed by the images that precede and follow it. The piece takes various
forms, but it is organized in a grid with each space in the grid bearing an alphanumeric code tied to an image. These separate images are linked to various keywords, which in turn are connected to other images, texts, maps, and
recordings. A single image can be attached to various different texts.
For instance, one photograph dating from around 1920 described as Nettie Perry on a Jenny biplane shows a black woman standing on the wing of
abiplane. The image is accompanied by the tag words aviation, history, Exodus, flight, movement, travel, women. These words are linked to texts and
sound r ecordings o f indi viduals r ecalling memo ries o r exp laining t hings,
which illuminate one or another aspect of the image: women empowered by
freedom of movement, the African Diaspora, the history of airplanes, and so
on. The viewer can choose to read all of the texts or follow a different thread
of images and texts. While in G reens videotapes and films the protagonist
guided the viewer through the various images and texts, in t his piece, as in
her installations, the artist turns more control over to the viewer.
The title of the piece Code: Survey refers to two different activities that take
place in t he development of an archive of information: surveying and then
organizing that information so it can be retrieved again. There are many references to sur veillance in t he images and texts themselves including aerial
photographs of jammed highways and images of control centers where workers monitor traffic patterns on video screens. Although these images speak to
the use of surveillance to control the movement of traffic, the term also suggests that photographs viewed as documents, as in an archive or any system
of information, have the power to objectify and control the individuals that
are its subject matter.
Code: Survey, as des cribed by Green, explores Californias romance with
the freedom of the road provided by car culture. In reading through these
images and texts, the browser discovers that the seeming limitless freedom of
movement in our culture has b een managed, guided, and curtailed. For instance, images tied to the word immigration show the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent during World War i i. This image links t o
aphotograph of a Chinese American pilot in the 1930s, a faded p ostcard of
boats anchored in the harbor, and so on. Anchored within series organized in
a grid, the photographs meaning is made more complex. We are given readings and counter-readings of the image based on the relationships established
by the archive.
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The grid and the series, as the visual analogies for the archive, also emerge
as t he q uintessential str uctures f or o rganizing inf ormation. The gr id a nd
theseries organize the modern systems of streets, indexes, buildings, maps,
graphs, and tables. Rosalind Krauss in her analysis of Eugene Atgets body of
work argued that, because his work was organized as an archive, it dispelled
the notion that Atget was a kind of fine artist.64 In conceptual art of the 1960s,
rational systems of organization, such as the archive, were used to reduce the
artists expressive contribution to the work. The viewer is invited to figure out
the rules of the game, the formula that determined the works structure in Sol
LeWitts serial sculptures or Hollis Framptons alphanumerical films.
In Greens works we are also asked, as we move through the installations,
to determine the connection between the objects and images, to analyze the
stories being told and the way they are being told, as well as to think about
those things that are overlooked. If Marcel Broodthaerss or Bernd and Hilla
Bechers archives exclude certain material in order to convey a certain message, Greens focuses instead on having the viewer question how the document, the object, or the category is subject to the archival structure. Greens
installations position the viewer as r eader to question the rules and procedures of the archive.
Installations to Be Read
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the various techniques of mechanical and electronic recording that are available have produced material
memory. Greens work starts with memory as materialized in the form of an
object to analyze. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts begins with questions about
the documentation of a si te-specific work and goes on to question how we
evaluate documents of history and their relationship to memory.
The archive is the structure that contains this form of materialized memory and many installation artists have employed the structure of the archive
in t heir work. However, Green often us es a na rrative str ucture to le ad t he
viewer into the work. The protagonist in G reens films becomes the person
with whom the viewer identifies and follows through the film as archive. In
the installations, the viewer becomes a kind of protagonist who sifts through
the ma terial o f t he in stallation. The vie wer find t hreads t hat co nnect t he
materials as the art historian Alex Alb erro has noted constructs narratives, and finds discrepancies.
The viewer, in browsing through the installations materials, mimes Greens
own research practice. The viewer is a critical reader who discovers that the
significance and meaning of objects in t he archives, and the memories and
evidence of history in the form of photographs, documents, and objects, can
change based on their relationships and arrangements. Greens work uses the
structure of collage and series, grid and archive, to invite the viewer to question how meanings are produced from these materials. In that process, the
photograph as document is revealed to be an ideological object whose frame
guides our reading of it. Greens work is distinct among other kinds of sitespecific in stallations t hat t ake t he f orm o f a rchives in t hat i t involves t he
viewer in the process of reading, interpretation, and the production of history and memory.
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THREE
the poetics of experience

A N N H A M I LT O N S I N S TA L L AT I O N S A N D P H O T O G R A P H S
The Picture Is Still

The building sits at the edge of a ha rbor presided over by submarines and
destroyers whose flags wave in the breeze. The only feature that distinguishes
this building from the dusty warehouses around it is the Chelsea-style frosted
glass door. Pushing open the door, I feel first the relative coolness and darkness of the space. A slight tinkling sound accompanies my movement, as the
breeze follows me into the building. It is dark because the ceiling is hung with
lines o f c harcoal stic ks da ngling pa rallel t o t he gr ound f rom str ings suspended above me. They hang in a thick cloud, causing an immediate sensation of claustrophobia, as my head penetrates the mass. The charcoal is also
the source of the chiming sound, as the sticks, rendered crystalline in their
transformation to charcoal, strike each other in the breeze.
It is difficult to determine the dimensions of the room because the light
from the doors reaches only so far. But despite the gloom, one begins to sense
the relative emptiness of this space, an emptiness underscored by a low, watery tone, almost like a whale signal. It echoes from the bare concrete floors
and metal walls of two welded, metal tunnels and from the massive I-beams
sunk in a trench that cuts across the floor. As they ascend to the ceiling, the
I-beams disappear into the mass of charcoal. Once I walk among the strings
of c harcoal a nd lo ok u p at t he ceilin g, I r ealize t hat w hat ini tially s eemed
quite dense is q uite sparse. And as y ou move through the charcoal, it is almost like walking through a swimming school of fish. The strings reach past
my shoulders and the sticks ring as I walk through them. The entire space is
not that large; the echoes make it seem much larger than it is.
THE POETICS OF EXPERIENCE
The trench leads the viewer toward the tunnels. They are massive, made of
steel and concrete, and they seem quite old. As I enter the musty right-hand
tunnel, I realize the strange watery sound is coming from a video projection
on the back wall. In the video, a camera pans over a black-and-white photograph of a p erson with an open mouth. It s cans t he contours of t he he ad,
mouth, and body. It is difficult to read the picture, and the camera lens, which
must b e tiny, dist orts t he imag e. A w hispering v oice na rrates t he ca meras
discoveries. To be in this space is like being underwater in the hull of a ship
or an empty, dry tomb. The strange effect is deliberate. This eerie space, which
was located in a small warehouse in the city of Yokosuka, Japan, is Ann Hamiltons installation the picture is still from 2001.
I chose this particular installation because it is one of the few by Hamilton
that I have experienced first hand. Claire Bishop in her book Installation Art:
A Critical History writes that installations depend on the viewers presence
in and direct experience of the space. This is tr ue in ma ny cases, but what
happens when the majority of people see installation art, as in t he works in
the previous chapter, in p hotographs only? Seeing the picture is s till in si tu
provides me with the opportunity to compare the first-hand experience of an
installation to photographs of it to understand what is lost and what is gained
in the photographic documentation of installation art.
Hamilton was invited by Akira Ikeda Gallery to make the installation. This
unremarkable space in trigued her b ecause of its notable history. When she
first s aw t he building, w hich was le ased by Akira Ik eda f rom t he Japanese
government, it had been fashioned into a regular exhibition space with white
walls and concrete floor. She noticed that the welded metal tunnels were visible, rising above the floor, but completely ignored. She decided t o inquire
about the buildings history. During World War ii, she was informed, torpedoes were loaded o nto ships through the tunnels. Learning this, Hamilton
wanted to explore the sites connection to history not to re-present it but to
evoke the gravity of that history. The picture is still is one among a group of
installations that Hamilton made in the 1990s that engaged with histories of
particular sites in various ways. For the picture is still, she chose to uncover
the original bones of the building and thereby expose the history hidden by
the gallerys white cube format.
Like Rene Green, Hamilton begins her installations by doing a great deal
of research. She knew that Colonel Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the pilot of the plane
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the Enola Gay, which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, lived in her ho me
town of Columbus, Ohio. Searching for connections to Tibbets, she lo oked
through the photo archives at the Ohio H istorical Society for images from
World War ii. In the process, she was struck by the way the photograph distances the viewer from the moment it depicts.1
The German critic Siegfried Kracauer had also noticed the distancing effect
of photographs decades e arlier. Looking at a p ortrait photograph, Kracauer
described shivering at the reduction of a living person to a conglomeration of
immobilized ob jects.2 Ro land B arthes, lo oking a t p hotographs o f his la te
mother, w ould later des cribe t he p hotograph as flat de ath, a co ncise description of the way the photograph flattens and abstracts that which it depicts but also preserves the moment now lost.3 The title of Hamiltons installation speaks to the nature of the photograph and its connection to history. It
is both still and still here, while the moment has vanished.4 For Hamilton, the
sense of loss she experienced in looking at the photograph leads to a desire to
restore the fullness of that moment in o rder to understand it. Something
about this became apparent as I lo oked at more and more photographs
of t he wa r the a trocities o n b oth sides we ca nt under stand f rom t he
pictures we cant have that time back. Yet its very history is a constant and
invisible presence in our time.5
Although Hamilton is wr iting about history in t his quotation, her st atement is also an accurate characterization of the tension between installation
art that requires the viewers bodily experience of the work and photographs
of t he work. For t his typ e of installation art, t he photograph is ma rked by
loss. Installation artists who make works in this vein, like Hamilton, regard
the viewers experience of the installation to be of primary importance. The
aim of Hamiltons installation work is t o break down the distance that remains between viewer and artwork, to engage the viewer through the body
and the senses. Photographs of the work, however, reduce the complexity of
the bodily experience of it. Hence, photographs present a problem for Hamiltons work because they condition, as w e have seen from chapter 1, ho w a
work of art is perceived and understood for both its current and its historical
audience. Hamiltons installation the picture is still grapples with this problem
in the historical experience of war that has been forgotten. Hamilton chose to
deal with photographic documentation differently from Green and other artists who work with and make archives and who seek to understand memory
and history through these formats. Hamiltons installation tries, instead, to

conjure the way the war continues to haunt the present through a corporeal
experience.
Another body of Hamiltons work from the late 1990s p inpoints the moment an experience turns into image. To make these pieces, a willing subject
must stand before Hamilton, in close proximity to her face, and stare at her
mouth for an extended period of time. The artist holds in her mouth a small
simple pinhole camera for which she us es her li ps as a kind o f shutter. The
images that are produced look like eyes at the moment they open. The sitters r esponse t o t heir exp erience is o ften p lain in t he imag e: dis comfort,
hilarity, a nd b oredom. These p ictures attempt t o capture a n exp erience o f
being in a body in the presence of another body in defiance of the flattening,
abstracting, a nd stillin g effect of t he p hotograph. These w orks exp lore t he
tension between experience and image by taking a different route through the
image.
Photography a nd t he p hotographic co ndition a re t herefore t hreaded
through Hamiltons work, but there remains a tension between photography
and lived experience. Photography is a supplement to Hamiltons work, and
for other installation works like Hamiltons, which are interested in va rious
modes of direct bodily experience. These works produce their own supplements in the form of photographic archives and catalogs, which circulate in
the networks of the international art market and provide symbolic status. The
photographs of these pieces serve as documentation as well as providing an
unacknowledged support for these works in an expanding art world. Bodily
experience is made the explicit subject matter of this work precisely because
it is set off by these photographic images. Hamiltons body of work is one of
many that reveal a dialog between picture and experience in installation art.
Although these kinds of works do not incorporate photographic archives, in
an effort to deal with the ephemerality of these pieces, they inevitably produce such archives through the documentation of the works.
Hamiltons haunting installation of charcoal in the picture is still highlights
the relationship between image and experience. Hamilton wrote, For me a
central experience is the twining of the collective and horizontal body overhead to the vertical singular shadow image of ones body in the work this
can be documented but is something that when you experience it is central
to the structure and meaning of the project.6
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This is not a new preoccupation for Hamilton but goes back to some of her
earliest professional work. Hamilton began her undergraduate education in
1974, at St. Lawrence University, a liberal arts school, but then transferred to
Ohio State University and then to the University of Kansas where she trained
as a w eaver. She graduated with a M aster of Fine Ar ts degree in s culpture
from Yale University in 1985. 7 In graduate school, Hamilton began making
room-sized sculptural installations characterized by visual distortion. Her first
major installation was room in pursuit of a position (1983) where cockeyed
and fragmented bits of furniture were scattered across the ceiling, floor, and
walls of a room. The piece played with viewing positions and perspective.
Hamilton had an interest in photography and the way the photograph renders the body, or parts of it, an object. She used photographs of her own body
to create sculptures that rendered her experience of her body uncanny. This
relationship between body, object, and image was explored in formal terms
in Hamiltons series of studio photographs later called the body object series.
Hamilton dressed herself with objects such as shoes, branches, or a door. In
these images, the object and the artists body are joined, confusing the division between subject/object, self, and other in the image that results.
In makin g t hese imag es, Hamilton s aid, she r ealized she wa nted t o no t
represent the experience but instead make the experience be her w ork. She
was encouraged by David von Schlegell in Yale Universitys sculpture department t o lo ok a t p erformance as a n addi tion t o her w ork.8 Soo n a fter, she
made the piece suitably positioned, often described as the toothpick suit. In
this piece, Hamilton wore a suit bristling with toothpicks and stood for hours
in a do orway. The suit activated the space a round her a nd changed the encounter with other indi viduals w ho approached her, as H amilton did no t
interact with them but rather offered herself as an object of the viewers gaze.
Joan S imon p oints out t his connection b etween t he body object ser ies and
suitably positioned and Hamiltons later use of performers who also are instructed not to interact with viewers but to behave as if absorbed in their own
activities. S he s oon b egan makin g mo re r oom-sized in stallations t hat involved tremendous amounts of various kinds of material piled on floors and
tables, and adhered to walls and other surfaces.
In the late 1980s, Hamiltons installations expanded to include several interacting elements and grew somatically intense. The installation also often
included a performer who buried his hand in sand, sanded mirrors, or other
simple activities. The environments were richly textured and often visually
stark, including single figures or objects in vast fields of material. She also
began using the attendants in t he work. These were volunteers who spent
all day performing a manual task, such as knitting or sanding objects in the
installation. In the late 1990s, Hamiltons work shifted to pieces in which the
viewer was the only human presence. Notably, in 1999, she was chosen as the
U.S. representative at the Venice Biennale and constructed myein, an elaborate installation of many parts, such as a rac k of knotted handkerchiefs in
the courtyard and a mottled glass wall. The installation resembled an empty
stage set in w hich pink powder fell from the ceiling in t he U.S. Pavilion in
Venice and dusted Braille that was embossed on the wall. After this project,
Hamiltons work became simpler, relying on single devices, such as at hand
(2002), where custom-made machines mounted in ceiling beams picked up
and dropped papers, which fluttered to the floor, a feature she later repeated
for corpus at Mass MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 20032004. It
was the viewers experience of these strange but absorbing spaces that became
the heart of Hamiltons work. At the same time, she co nsidered the photographs of these spaces to be important but subordinate to this aspect.
Studying Experience
Experience and the related ideas of participation, immersion, and spectacle
have been a part of art discourse and of ephemeral artworks, such as installations, since the 1960s. Art writers describe experience as valuable. It is seen
as transformative, as in vigorating, as s omething t hat puts vie wers in co mmand of their surroundings and senses. For instance, installation-type work
includes and activates viewers and the artworks space. As their bodies and
the exhibition space are included in the experience of the work, viewers are
guided to reflect on the process of perception or experience. In this way, they
are put in command of the experience and led to a new understanding of the
work of art and their selves.
Experience that contributes to the sense of self and shared experience is the
foundation for group identity and community. Since the late eighteenth century undergoing experience has been considered the primary means of constructing the modern self.9 As an example of this modern sensibility, Craig
Ireland p oints to t he late eig hteenth-century de velopment of t he Bildungs-
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roman, in which the novels protagonist undergoes a journey that causes the
character to develop. The novel in this sense reflects modern experience. The
self in modernity is subject to change and capable of integrating experience
as an inherent process of its formation.
The twentieth-century American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey in
his book Art as E xperience used the art encounter as a wa y to examine experience in g eneral. Dewey des cribed exp erience as a d ynamic interaction
between self and environment. He argued that all experiences resemble aesthetic experience insofar as they have a wholeness and integrity setting them
off from the ordinary run of events. For Dewey, the subject could never be
the same after undergoing an experience. Experience transforms the self.10
This idea is typical of modernist notions of self-formation. The aesthetic experience, for Dewey, becomes the ideal way to experience experience, so to
speak, and to participate in the process of self-formation that is necessary to
modernity. Hans-Robert Jauss writes, To experience art is an excellent way
in which to experience the alien you in its otherness, and, thereby, in turn to
have an enriched exp erience of ones own I.11 Martin Jay argues too that
experience leaves changed the sense of self. That is, an experience, however
we define it, cannot simply duplicate the prior reality of the one who undergoes it, le aving him o r her p recisely as b efore; s omething must b e altered,
something new must happen, to make the term meaningful.12 In this sense,
experience is something that disrupts the horizon of expectation and is thus
able to offer new perspectives on old ideas and social practices.
This characterization of experience taken more broadly can be seen as the
foundation for social change, and other theorists have based their work on
these ideas. Craig Ireland points to E. P. Thompsons appeal to common experience in the formation of a group consciousness (or in Thom psons case,
working-class consciousness) as a foundation for political action. Thom pson
criticized a bstract t heorizing a nd t urned t o e veryday exp erience as a wa y
toresist dominant middle-class culture. His political ideas derived from his
work as a hist orian who examined the history of social and work practices
among t he English working class. Thompson argued t hat t he difference of
working-class experience would provide members of this class the ground
from which to question and criticize dominant culture.13
One of the points that Craig Ireland makes about E. P. Thom psons appeal
to exp erience is t hat immediate exp erience is s een as s omething t hat falls
outside of language. The body becomes the foundation from which an outside of ideology can be formed. The problem with this argument, as Ireland
points out, is that it reifies the body, takes it outside of history and culture and
naturalizes differences. From this ground an alternative politics and agency
can be formed, a stance that has the potential to be liberating or coercive with
regard to who can be included in the group and how the characteristics of the
group are defined.
Movements including feminism, civil rights, and postcolonial politics have
emphasized the importance of the difference in p ersonal experience of the
group for defining and articulating community identity and a sense of political agency.14 Ireland argues that this understanding of experience came to the
fore in the 1970s. It informed subaltern politics, such as the feminist movement (the personal is political) and other cultural phenomena of the 1970s
from the back to the land movement to the reemergence of handicraft as
aform of resistance to industrialized, capitalist culture. At the same time, the
appeal t o exp erience in t he 1960s a nd 1970s sug gests t hat exp erience had
become a c urious and interesting topic, as if t here was no lo nger certainty
about what experience is.
Art as Experience
Perhaps i t is b ecause o f t he uncer tainty co ncerning exp erience t hat i t has
become a prominent aspect of art practice and exhibition since the 1970s. As
in the social movements, we can see the notion of experience appearing in
feminist art practices in t he 1970s w here the appeal to personal experience
issubject matter for art as well as the means for effecting social change. Discussing and displaying shared experience was a primary strategy in the feminist practices of Suzanne L acy, L eslie L abowitz, Judy Chicag o, a nd other
artists. It is the central tenet as well of more recent community and activistoriented new genre public art. It has als o been a significant aspect of the
group of practices designated relational aesthetics as well as installation art,
as Claire Bishop argues. Art institutions can provide a unique experience in
the form of performances or installation art. Writers in the field of art criticism over the twentieth century have valued some types of experiences in art
practice more than others. For instance, in his canonical 1939 essay AvantGarde and Kitsch, Clement Greenberg makes the case for valuing aesthetic
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experience over the experience of everyday life. He argued that fine art must
maintain its autonomy from the experiences of a degraded ca pitalist kitsch
culture. I n do ing s o, t he aest hetic exp erience p rovided b y fine a rt ena bles
criticism of modern culture in general.
Unlike the encounter with an everyday object, the encounter with a modernist painting, according to Greenberg, was a purely visual and instantaneous
experience, distinct from any other experience in daily life. Painting, as a visual medium that emphasizes its own material limits, must address itself to
the e yes. M ichael F ried, G reenbergs p rotg, des cribed t his exp erience o f
modernist painting as presentness. Presentness is grace, he wrote famously
at the end o f his ess ay 1967 Artforum article Art and Objecthood, underscoring the sense that aesthetic experience in modernist art should be transcendent and specific.
However, in modernist painting, aesthetic experience is visual, and it addresses a dis embodied sub ject. Modernist cr iticism f ollows a tradi tion in
Western culture in w hich vision has b een seen as t he highest of the senses.
Having no dir ect co ntact wi th i ts ob ject, visio n has tradi tionally b een r egarded as corresponding to the intellect, reason, or spirit.15 The idealization
of vision filtered into modernist art criticism of the midcentury, which, thus,
reinforced the historical hierarchy of the senses. Later critics of modernist
art and criticism in the 1960s and 1970s, such as Brian ODoherty and Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris, describe the modernist aesthetic experience
not as transcendent but as lacking. It is an experience in which vision is isolated from the other senses and cut off from the body. ODoherty, as we have
seen, argued that the modernist art gallery is constructed to deny any sense
but t hat o f t he e ye a nd, in do ing s o, mak es s eeing a n in tellectual ac tivity
rather than a holistic organic activity.
In the 1977 ess ay The Present Tense of Space Robert Morris noted that
sculpture in t he 1960s a nd 1970s was distin guished by an interest in dir ect
experience t hat was b ound u p in spa tial a nd t emporal p erception. Morris
describes the work of artists such as Richard Serra and Robert Irwin as being
part o f ne w spatial a rts, w hich a re a rts o f t he p resent t ense.16 The spatial
installation-type w ork als o produced ne w cr iteria f or a rt in t he 1970s. H e
argues t hat t his work is dir ected at t he subject in t he mo de of I, t he s elf
caught up in the immediate moment of perception or lived experience. The
spatial experience for this subject is infused with a sense of continuous time
and is framed by the limits of the body. Morris separates this I mode from
me, which is a sense of self that forms in reflection on experience in judgment, in language, or in memory. With a typical modernist painting, where
the viewer in theory grasps the static object immediately, the distance between
the I and t he me mo de is q uite short. In t he ne w spatial work, Morris
says, the distance between one and the other is much greater. The encounter
with this type of art, he implies, takes more work. It requires something from
the viewer and offers something to the viewer in return, in terms of the richness of the experience. Mary Miss and Suzanne Harriss work also seem to be
based on this idea of the importance of direct experience.
For her pa rt, Rosalind Krauss describes the subject that exp eriences the
Minimalist art as differing from the biographical subject. The Minimalist subject is composed of distinct, intense moments of bodily perception that are
merely strung together but do not necessarily develop or become integrated.
These in tense mo ments o f p erception co uld p rovide t he gr ound f or r esistance to experience in ind ustrialized culture, as K rauss says, but she wa rns
they also describe the postmodern fragmented subject that is the product
of late industrialization.
Krauss goes on to draw the connection between experience of the Minimalist object and broader social conditions:
And thus this is, we could say, compensatory, an act of reparations to a subject
whose everyday experience is one of increasing isolation, reification, specialization, a subject who lives under the conditions of advanced industrial culture
as an increasingly instrumentalized being. It is to this subject that Minimalism,
in an act of resistance to the serializing, stereotyping, and banalizing of commodity production, holds out the promise of some instant of bodily plenitude
in a gesture that we recognize as deeply aesthetic.17
Mary Ann Doane says something similar about contingency. The contingency of the lived moment represents a kind of freedom in the face of structured and rationalized time in ind ustrial capitalist culture. Other artists in
the 1960s expanded the notion of aesthetic experience. Allan Kaprow thought
the participants experience of his environments, Happenings, and activities
was central to his work. He studied Dewey, making notes in the margins of
Art as E xperience.18 He seemed to read Dewey as sug gesting that quotidian
experience could be aesthetic experience. Kaprows ritualized activities and
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environments were intended to focus the participants attention on the everyday sensation, the simple gesture, and the routine task. As Kaprow wrote in
1958 in The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, he believed artists of the 1960s would
make the viewer
preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and objects of our everyday
life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be the vastness of FortySecond Street. . . . Not only will these bold creators show us, as if for the first
time, the world we have always had about us but ignored, but they will disclose
entirely unheard-of happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files,
hotel lobbies; seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams
and horrible accidents.19
In this article, Kaprow sees the artist as revitalizing the viewers perception
of t he e veryday w orld t hrough distinc t exp eriences. Cla mbering t hrough
Kaprows hot tires on a summer day in Yard (1961) or shuffling through the
newspapers a nd c hicken wir e t o c hoose a f resh o r fak e apple in An Ap ple
Shrine (1960), the viewer, the artist hoped, would rediscover a childlike awareness. For Kaprow, the art experience goes beyond the aesthetic sphere and
transforms t he vie wers a nd t he a rtists e veryday exp erience. K aprows description of the subjects transformation of perception rhyme Deweys notion
of experience as a way of shaping the self.
Experience is a t erm t hat has b een applied, t herefore, in ma ny different
contexts in American art from the discourse on modernist painting to the reference to phenomenology in minimal a rt and performance. Claire Bishops
book Installation Art continues this discussion by enumerating the varieties
of exp erience p roduced b y in stallations o f va rious s orts a nd t he vie wing
subjects they construct. Minimalism, especially Robert Morriss writings, has
clearly been influential in t hese revisions of the notion of aesthetic experience. The influence of Minimalism would also help to transform the nature
of exhib ition spaces a fter t he 1960s. Ros alind K rauss des cribes a co nversation she had with Thomas Krens about the moment he conceived of Mass
MoCA, the grand, transformed industrial space in North Adams, Massachusetts, which showcases installation art. Krens thought of renovating the site
for a museum after having seen a large gallery in G ermany converted from
afactory space. Krausss anecdote is telling because it says a great deal about
the exhibition context for installations in t he 1980s, 1990s, a nd 2000s. A c-
cording to Krauss, Krens said that the small-scale museum that tells the story
of art history was obsolete precisely because of Minimalisms demands on the
viewer and the space of the exhibition site, which
would forego history, in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an
aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically
spatial, the model for which, in Krenss own account, was in fact, Minimalism.
It is Minimalism, says Krens in relation to his own revelation, that has reshaped
the way we, as late twentieth century viewers, look at art; the demands we now
put on it; our need to experience it along with its interaction with the space in
which it exists; our need to have a cumulative, serial, crescendo towards the
intensity of this experience; our need to have more and at a larger scale.20
Krausss example for this type of exhibition space is a M inimalist exhibition at the Muse dart moderne de la ville in Paris, in which the redesigned
space and the interaction of the works (the light cast from Dan Flavins light
sculptures) with this newly grandiose and neutralized space are central, rather
than the works themselves. However, Krauss goes on to connect these sites to
a shift in t he art market in w hich museums become like corporate entities.
She points to Krens using the term museum industry, which was p erhaps
an unfamiliar idea in 1990 but is now commonplace. The industrialization of
the museum, she says, will require the increased control of resources in the
form of art objects that can cheaply and efficiently be entered into circulation. Further, in relation to the effective marketing of this product, there will
be the requirement of larger and larger surface[s] over which to sell product[s]
in order to increase what Krens himself calls market share.21 Krauss is referring to the franchising of art institutions, such as t he Guggenheim Museum. Installation art has b ecome a do minant medium in t hese exhibition
venues. Art historian Kate Mondloch notes in relation to media-based installations that the audience member who can walk through an installation and
window-shop can determine the time o f viewing, making this one of the
appealing aspects of installation for contemporary audiences.22
Contemporary Installation Art as the Art of Experience

There are many examples of installations that emphasize viewers direct experience of the work and are exhibited in these sorts of exhibition venues. In
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fact, one could argue that, because they focus on direct experience of various
sorts, all of the pieces that Claire Bishop discusses in Installation Art: A Critical History could be included in this category. Almost any work that focuses
on bodily experience, that engages more than the visual sense, or that transforms a space into an immersive environment would participate in this strain
of installation art. These are works of art that focus on internal, present-tense
experience.
The following short survey of these works falls into three basic categories
that crystallize different aspects of experience. The first are installations that
focus on immersive materiality and on engaging the viewers senses of touch,
smell, and even taste. These works focus on sensation in the present. Some of
these pieces seek to avoid the domination of vision in Western culture and
have their roots in works from the 1960s, such as Allan Kaprows and Hlio
Oiticicas. The s econd category includes works t hat s eek to engage t he observer in r eflection on the processes of perception, such as sig ht or sound.
These works ultimately derive from the sculptural practices of the 1960s and
1970s r elated t o M inimalism, suc h as Rob ert M orris a nd Ric hard S erras
large-scale site-specific pieces. A third strain of work focuses on the materiality of objects and their relationship to the human senses to evoke memories
and human experience. These works focus on how sensation helps in recollection of the past. The materiality of the work is intended to produce an atmosphere of charged emotion, such as the installations of Joseph Beuys and
other artists who use materials symbolically.
One strain of work focusing on the senses and materiality comes out of
Latin America in the 1960s. This would include work by Hlio Oiticica and
Lygia Clark who emphasized direct bodily engagement with the work. A more
recent example would be Ernesto Netos large-scale, soft, s culptural installations. Or iginally f rom Brazil, Neto makes work t hat draws on t he Neoconcretist sculptures of Clark and Oiticica. His work is o ften composed of
soft, stretchy, polyamide polyps, which are hung from the ceiling and then
filled with various materials, such as aromatic spices. The sculptures suggest
an organic, living body and engage not only the visual sensation but also the
sense of touch and smell. One well-known piece titled Walking in Venus Blue
Cave was an entire room through which viewers could walk, exploring with
their hands the fleshy orifices, and feeling the polyps stuffed with Styrofoam,
spices, or other materials. Like Hamiltons, Netos work seeks to immerse and
to engage the viewers senses.
Tara Donovans sculptural installations could also be included in this category. Although D onovan do es not f ocus on en gaging t he s ense of s ound
orsmell, her installations create a dramatic tactile space by the accumulation
of simple materials such as plastic straws or pieces of tar paper (Transplanted,
2003). These materials are organized in a r epetitive pattern that makes the
material appear to be a gr owing organism. The work often requires a c lose
look before the observer understands the materials being used, and for this
reason, they are difficult to photograph. The large-scale works of Anish Kapoor have a similar materiality. Kapoors pieces are often made of stretched
cloth or carefully polished metal walls that create unsettling distortions. It is
difficult to understand these works visually. Concave surfaces appear to be
convex, while punctures in a wall seem to extend to infinity. In Past, Present,
Future (2006) exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, onequarter of a sphere composed of a waxy, red substance was raked by a circular
blade that over time created scars in the perfect circular form. Kapoors work
stages materiality and frames the act of perception on a grand scale.
Another type of installation work derives more directly from Minimalism,
especially the large-scale works of the 1970s, suc h as Rob ert Morriss maze
pieces and Richard Serras ellipses and arcs. All of these pieces are about the
experience of space a nd sensation in t he present tense. An e arly example
would be the work of James Turrell whose installations make light seem palpable. In a well-known series of works, a viewer enters a gallery to see a large,
brightly colored, practically glowing rectangle mounted on the far wall. However, when one approaches the rectangle, the space suddenly drops back, and
the viewer realizes that this is a n opening into another colorful light-filled
chamber. The mist installations of Ann Veronica Janssens, such as Whose
Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow f rom 2001, a re p erhaps the des cendants of
Turrells exercise in illusionism. In this piece, the artist constructed a roomsized installation and created a colored space for viewers to move through by
filling the room with smoke and then lighting it through colored filters. The
light installations of Spencer Finch are another more conceptual example of
this kind o f work. Finch tries to re-create his exp erience of light in cer tain
locations, such as L os Alamos, New Mexico, in Blue (sky over Los Alamos,
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New Mexico, 5/5/00, m orning effect). In this piece, he us es electric bulbs to

re-create the effect of natural light for his viewers. Japanese sound and installation artist Ryoji Ikeda strikes a slightly different tone in his light pieces. In
Spectra i i, Ikeda made a w ork that recalls Bruce Naumans Green Light Corridor f rom t he e arly 1970s. I n t his p iece, Ik eda invited a n obs erver into a
darkened room, which turns out to be a co rridor. Blinded by the darkness,
the sometimes-frightened viewer is confronted by a high-pitched tone that is
connected to a strobe light. As the viewers eyes adjust, a red laser appears at
the end of the corridor, which the viewer can choose to walk toward or not.
More strictly sculptural versions of these kinds of works include the large
Torqued Ellipses by Richard Serra located at the Dia Art Foundations Beacon
New York institution. Viewers must navigate these large-scale pieces and pay
attention to both their perceptions of how the works mold space and create
subtle variations in a ir pressure and s ound and t he way lig ht plays on t he
rusting met al a nd p roduces shado ws a nd hig hlights. I n J ulianne S wartzs
work of architectural intervention Line Drawing, she punched round openings through the walls of the space. Swartz then used fans and mirrors to alter
the perception of the space.23 Her work derives from Michael Ashers alterations of galleries and many of the pieces that were exhibited in t he Rooms
exhibition, such as b y Gordon Matta-Clark and Mary Miss or by Alice Aycock. Certain works by Carsten Hller function in t he same way, including
his metal slide pieces, which participants are allowed to slide down to experience the thrill of speed and gravity. All of these works rely on the observers
presence and experience of the space, as Bishop says.
A final category of installation art would be works that use space and materials to refer not to the present but to the past. I n these pieces, sensuous
materials are employed to evoke memory, human experiences, or stories. I
would include Ann Hamiltons work in this category, along with artists such
as the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo and French artist Christian Boltanski.
For instance, in Salcedos work, memory is concentrated in the form of dense
sculptural works that employ a postminimal sculptural language. Using old
wooden furniture that has been filled with concrete, Salcedo evokes not only
the private interior of the home and the family but also the density of human
bodies. Gathered together in large installations, these pieces refer to the effects of the civil war in C olombia. More recently, Salcedo has made w orks
that utilize chairs to fill up architectural voids, such as her dramatic contribu-
tion to the 2003 I stanbul Biennial, where she us ed thousands of old chairs
piled a few stories high to fill an empty lot between two apartment buildings
in Istanbul.
Christian Boltanski uses objects to evoke a sense of dread and mystery. In
Boltanskis Les H abits de F ranois C , he p hotographed i tems o f c hildrens
clothing in black and white, as if they were pieces of evidence. He then placed
the photographs in deep boxes and mounted them on the wall in a grid formation.24 The ob jects a re unif orm a nd gr im a nd sug gest a nonymous a nd
premature death an allusion to the Holocaust. In another piece from the
mid-1980s, ti tled Chases High S chool, B oltanski re-photographed t he individual faces o f students from a J ewish high school class that graduated in
1931 in Vienna. He enlarged the images, made them blurry, and rendered the
sitters remote, setting them up under desk lamps that should illuminate but
that obscure the images instead. These were then set on top of old tin biscuit
boxes.25 The viewer will know nothing more about the people in the photographs. The viewer is thus prevented from making any connection with the
people in t he image. This work relates to Boltanskis earlier archive-like inventory pieces and his general fascination with the question of individuality
and death in mass culture. Joseph Beuys influenced all of these works, which
use symbolically or culturally charged materials to convey ideas about spirituality and experience. Ann Hamiltons work falls into this last group of installation art.
All of these works focus on perception and experience in the present tense
for individual bodies. They seem to elude photographic representation. However, it is in the attempt to grasp the present tense, Mary Ann Doane argues,
that the archival impulse is born.
Memory, Experience, and Historical Images in Hamiltons Work

Ann Hamiltons interest in experience is due in part to her observation that
the way we deal with objects and materials in everyday life has changed radically in mo dernity. She thinks of consumer culture as contributing to a decline in knowledge.
Anni Albers talks about this predicament in her book On Designing. She writes
about the fact that there is so much schizophrenic behavior in society because
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we dont have contact with materials from a raw to finished state. In the kind
of work we do every day, we engage midslot in something, from the way that
we buy food to the way that we push paper around.26
More recently, Hamilton has written,

We live in a world run by technologies that are invisible to us, a world in which
materials are often disassociated from their source in a world where the coat
on our back no longer links in our mind to the fleece of a sheep. I am interested in how the tactile knowledge of material processes and systems remain
relevant to our cultural imagination, in how embodied forms of knowledge
pass forward without being categorized as anachronistic or nostalgic.27
Like Robert Morris, Ann H amilton has t hought carefully about the reasons she mak es art focused on b odily exp erience. As the quotation above
indicates, her interest in the body comes from a response to everyday experience in a media-s aturated a nd t echnology-dependent en vironment. H er
work tries to enrich a viewers experience by encouraging them to focus on
how a nd w hat w e p erceive t hrough t he five s enses. S everal o f Hamiltons
installations from 1988 through 1996 were constructed as intense, sensuous
experiences in which the space buzzes with organic and mechanical rhythms.
Viewers are invited to be aware of their perceptions and sensations in these
spaces. Imagine crossing the threshold of mantle at the Miami Art Museum
(figure 3.1).
The artist sits in a chair sewing the sleeves on wool coats. In the same room,
shortwave radios broadcast news from around the globe and pungent flowers
wilt on a long table. In this space, the observer is immediately aware of simultaneous movements, sounds, and smells, and is challenged to be attentive to
these perceptions. In mantle, as viewers linger in the space, they attend to the
smell of the flowers as they dry imperceptibly and collapse and to the quiet,
steady rhythm of the artist sewing sleeves amidst the crackle from the radios.
Hamiltons work spans the gap between the simplifying aspect of photographic vision and the full-body immersive experience of her complex installations. I will argue in this section that Hamiltons work recalls, perhaps as a
distant collective memory, the moment when modern methods of production s upplanted cra ft o r wo rkshop p roduction b y me ans o f p hotographic
technology. It is t he s ame era in hist ory t hat t he p hotographic im pulse is
F I G U R E 3 . 1 A nn Hamilton, mantle. Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida, April 2June 7,

1998. Materials: about sixty thousand fresh-cut flowers; eight tables (each 32 feet x 6
inches x 6 inches), connected to a length of 48; eleven various model shortwave radio
receivers; shelf (72 feet long x 12 inches deep, mounted 13 feet above floor); broadcast
voice; thirty-three 4 x 4 inch speakers; white-painted wood and wicker chair; figure;
steel block; sewing implements; thirty-three gray, blue, and black wool coats.
Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.
born. This hist orical de velopment is st aged met aphorically in t he in stallations in which Hamilton employed an attendant to perform different kinds
of work in t he space. As we will s ee, these attendants embody the moment
when t he cra ftsperson was tra nsformed in to t he w orker via p hotographic
methods of study. It is an activity that not only took place in the past but also
takes place everyday when the consumption of images on screens displaces
the use of the whole body and its other senses.
These workers are placed within the context of sensually complex spaces.
For Hamilton, t he attempt t o stimulate all o f t he s enses is mo tivated by a
desire to produce an immersive experience for the viewer that engages all the
senses including vision. Hamiltons work invites the viewer to surrender to
the installation environment, to become absorbed in its surfaces via the sense
of sight, smell, touch, and even taste. The walls of her installations are often
covered wi th all s orts o f edib le ma terials, co rncobs, co rnmeal, a nd h usks;
sweet-smelling beeswax; eucalyptus; smoked pigskin; honey; bourbon-infused
water; and mussel shells. The white, clean surface of the gallery space is complicated and made sensual, inviting a connection with the viewers body. The
architecture is embodied by engaging the viewers body through all of the
senses.
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Hamilton, t hroughout her ca reer, has b een in terested in p roducing a n

embodied architecture that calls f or a r esponse from the viewers body and
responds to it as w ell. S een in psy choanalytic terms, it is a n exp erience of
bodily in timacy t hat r ecalls t he infa nts deep co nnection t o t he mo thers
body. Although Hamilton does not describe the work as strictly feminist, her
installations and interest in the senses share some characteristics with feminist a rtistic strategies, f ollowing t he t heories o f Luce I rigaray a nd Helne
Cixous, as in I rigarays This Sex, Which Is Not One and Cixouss Coming to
Writing and Other Essays that emphasize the sensation of touch, smell, or
hearing rather than sight as strategies for honoring the feminine. For Hamilton, this has taken the form of dislodging vision from its seat in the skull and
confusing it with other senses. For instance, in the picture is s till, Hamilton
used a tiny camera that she had had specially designed to film a photograph
with her fingers. As one watches the video, it is as if o ne is b oth seeing and
caressing the image at the same time. Her videos often conflate the senses in
this way. Her pieces reawaken latent bodily memories in such a way that the
viewer can be both seduced and disturbed.
Hamiltons in terest in b ody kno wledge is inf ormed b y her tra ining as a
weaver in the 1970s.28 For feminists in the 1970s, craft was a way to honor an
unacknowledged art practiced by women in t he past. B y practicing craft, i t
was possible to recover the experiences of women in the past and to include
them in the history of art. For Hamilton, agency is epitomized by the act of
making. And it is t he act of making that opens the subject to knowledge of
material experience. Hamiltons work seems to follow this logic. Hamiltons
interest in making has its roots in the work of artists such as Jackie Winsor,
whose emphasis on handwork at a heroic scale set her apart from the Minimalists with whom she is o ften compared. In Bound Square (1972), Winsor
recycled old rope and used its fiber to bind the ends of four logs together in
the ancient construction strategy of wrapping. The piece, although simple,
took hundreds of hours to produce. Anna Chave connects Winsors interest
in this type of work to the ingenuity she observed on the part of her mother
who raised her children in Newfoundland and built a house, cooked, canned,
and used all of the skills required to survive in a rugged rural setting.29 Winsors sculpture reflected her respect for labor and, as Chave notes, especially
the unremunerated labor associated with women.
In her 1991 interview, Hamilton discussed her own interest in hand labor,
which she connects to a neglected type of body knowledge that has been lost
in a society where the primary gesture is the pushing of buttons or touching
screens.30 New technologies and new types of work practices have changed
our engagement with the material world. A similar dismay accompanied the
change wrought in social and bodily practices by factory production. As the
Marxist theorist Georg Lukcs explains it in History and Class Consciousness,
the object produced by the factory is not the product of an organic work process where a single hand is involved from start to finish but instead the result
of many different automated processes. In the factory product, the traces of
labor are erased, as t he worker flicks his ha nd over the product as it moves
down the line. Walter Benjamin relates the same movement to the flick of the
gamblers wrist, or that of flipping on a light, striking a match, or pushing a
button on a camera the gesture produces no real experiences for the person w ho p erforms i t. Theodor A dorno a nd B enjamin a rgued t hat, in t he
transition to modernity, experience was str ipped to those essential features
necessary for functioning in an industrialized world.31 As in the movement
of a s econd ha nd on a c lock, unrelated a nd identical in stants acc umulate
with each automated gesture. Factory time is fixed into moments, not stories.
Time is rationalized in modernity. No knowledge or experience is activated in
the motion, as push-button technology circumvents the need for embodied
knowledge.
E. P. Thompson in his vivid accounts of weavers lives describes what advocates of the craftsman ideal believed they were losing in industrialization.32
Thompsons accounts focuses on a moment of transformation when handweaving was r eplaced b y w eaving mills in En gland. H is wr iting p rovides
glimpses of a w ork practice that allowed enough flexibility and leftover energy for collecting, writing poetry, making music, and gardening. While sitting at the loom, a weaver could prop up a book and read or talk with fellow
workers. Thompsons imag es co njure dr eams o f p reindustrial co ntentment
and security. He gathered anecdotes of weavers reactions to factory production and concluded, They resented, first, the discipline; the factory bell or
hooter; the time-keeping which over rode ill health, domestic arrangements,
or the choice of more varied occupations.33 There was a desir e in the nineteenth century to establish a movement to return to a system of production
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based on medieval practices of craft and guild o rganization and these tendencies continue into the twenty-first century. These advocates of the craftsman ideal, as the scholar Eileen B oris calls it, such as members of the arts
and crafts movement, s et up workshops and s chools to teach s oon-to-beforgotten met hods of handicraft.34 Ar tists and cr itics, such as t he English
artist William Morris and critic John Ruskin, hoped to undo t he alienation
that occurred in the industrial production of commodities.
The craftsman ideal continues in the twentieth and twenty-first century.
It is a r eaction against capitalist one-dimensionality. The Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse warned against a society of one-dimensional men, by
which he meant a society of those trained with one or two specialized skills
in order to fit into an integrated system of industrial production.35 Craft and
hand labor were perceived by some to be a way of getting outside these conditions. The ha ndmade p roduct r epresents t he p ossibility o f r esistance t o
modern capitalist culture. E. P. Thompson wrote his piece The Weavers in
the e arly 1960s in B ritain. I n t he 1960s in t he United S tates, t here was a
movement, with motivations similar to that of the arts and crafts movement,
to return to craft-based forms of production as a way of escaping 1960s corporate a nd ind ustrial c ulture. And t hese ide as co ntinue in t he d iy (do i t
yourself) movement that views the ability to make things by hand as a way to
resist the control of everyday life imposed by corporate culture.
Hamilton is ca reful t o distin guish her w ork f rom t he desir e t o valo rize
craft as artists did in t he 1970s. Hamiltons installations validate the process
of makin g wi thout p roducing m uch in t he wa y o f lo ng-lasting ha ndmade
objects. Instead, in Hamiltons work, the process of making is opened up and
transformed into its various experiential modes: material sensations, traces,
and actions. It shifts the interest from a permanent object to the components
of an experience that, perhaps, disrupts everyday experience in a push-button
technology culture. In this way, it seems to be connected to Doanes idea of
the contingent in modernity.
A primary difficulty for Hamiltons works lies in co nveying an experience
of craft and the body knowledge to an observing viewer without asking the
viewer to make something. The artist initially tried to solve this problem by
framing t he g estures o f ha nd la bor. Hamiltons la rge-scale in stallations o f
the early 1990s, w hich often involved the gathering and assembling of large
amounts of material, also marshaled large groups of volunteers. They nailed
metal tags to floors, folded shirts, and sewed silk panels. Hamiltons installations, like Judy Chicagos Dinner Party, were accumulations of large amounts
of hand labor. Even the picture is still involved the work of many volunteers
tying and hanging branches of charcoal by hand from the ceiling of the space.
The tasks to which Hamilton set her v olunteers were valuable for the artist
because they engaged her participants in the process of making.
These aest hetic g estures t ake t he f orms of t he w orkers repetitive movements in t he installations, of gestural marks left in t he heavily worked surfaces, and of video images of hands knitting, sewing, and so forth. In Hamiltons installations, when an attendant stages a gesture, it is integrated with
the working body. The defenders of the craftsman ideal claim that craft production enables a type of knowledge and an experience of the material world
that is lost in machine production by engaging the body more fully in work.
The holistic understanding of materials and processes that a craftsman knows
is reduced to a g esture or a s eries of simple gestures in ass embly-line production.
This process is figured in the image of the simple work diagram in which
aseries of movements is reduced to a set of visual signs: a two-dimensional
image. Bruce Kaiper describes the result: Instead the engineer includes us
[the workers] as a pa rt of the construction problem to be abstracted. Our
movements including our skill, the time we take and our work relations are
made into symbols, signs, mathematical equations and lines.36 The gesture
sets off a whole series of minute, complicated motions in the machinery into
which the hands gesture disappears.
The trace of the hand is reduced to a click or flick. In the factory-produced
object, the traces o f labor and the time i t took to make are illegible. Plastic
and metal do not accept the trace of a unique hand. The flick of the workers
hand over the product takes, ideally, only a moment, and the trace of one hand
working over the entire body of a commodity was replaced with the movement of many hands. Industrial production fragments the making process
so that individual workers no longer see the product of their efforts. Instead,
their gestures are scientifically measured and specific to the task at hand, as
this is the most efficient means of production. In this process, the body of the
worker is integrated into the work process.
The reduction of the work gesture to a click immediately calls to mind the
reduction of bodily experience to image via the click of an opened camera
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shutter. And t his is partly how these more efficient processes of production
came about. Frank B. Gilbreth, who was the pioneer of time-motion studies
to improve the efficiency of workers in p roduction, studied the motion of
workers via film and photographs. He did s o to break down t he complex
movements of a work into clear units and then to choreograph the gestures
of workers s o t hat t hey would accomplish t heir t asks in t he most efficient
manner possible.
Following the pioneering work of tienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge earlier in the nineteenth century, he filmed workers doing their work
against walls wi th a gr id painted on them and, using a sp ecially calibrated
clock, he timed t heir movements. He also attached light to workers hands
and set up a ca mera for long exposure, thereby attaining a co ntinuous line
that could be viewed in three dimensions in a stereograph. He then devised
ways to save movements and time. For instance, he t urned the lines o f the
stereograph into static, wire models that workers could use to learn how to
move.
In his classic study of bricklayers, Gilbreth follows a procedure of carefully
delineating all the variables that enter into efficient production.37 The y range
from the brawn of the workman to his contentment and to the weight and
size of his tools. He also studied the human body carefully and determined
the easiest and most comfortable gestures for a worker to make in the process of his w ork. Gilbreth had gr eat concern for the b odily comfort of the
workers. He advocated free food, good lighting, and frequent periods of rest
for the most efficient work. But this comfort was intended to make easier the
abstraction a nd integration o f a li ving b eing into t he p rocess o f mac hinebased factory assemblage to save money. Gilbreth aimed to make the human
into a machine in t he best way possible. He studies the human body as if i t
were a mac hine, making comparisons such as t he following, where he discusses a worker working on a machine and makes no distinction between the
two b odies: Motions sho uld b e o n t he f ore a nd a ft v ertical p lane passin g
through the body. It is s o necessary to have the motions similar that often
counterbalances a nd sp rings ca n b e in stalled t o r everse mo tion, t hus als o
causing the hardest work to be done in the most convenient direction.38
In Gilbreths films and photographs, we see workers seated at worktables
or standing at workbenches. The camera is positioned so that it is possible to
see the hands at work on the tabletop, which along with the walls, has b een
carefully covered with a grid. Gilbreth placed a timer, his microchronometer,

in the foreground of the film frame. It is b lack with white hands that turn
continually as the worker works. Gilbreth constructed his promotional films
with sequences of before and after the application of his methods. Before the
methods are applied, the workers motions are halting and hesitant. After the
application of his methods, in the newly brightened space, the workers hand
motions are synthesized to the repetition and rhythm of the work. Ther e is
no hesitation or fumbling to the gestures. In essence, the idiosyncrasy of the
gesture, the workers individual attempt to adapt to the work environment,
has been diminished, and the motion has been generalized and abstracted
a process of abstraction symbolized by the gridded photograph. The gesture
becomes automatic and universal and requires a cer tain kind o f limited attentiveness on the part of the worker. This attentiveness seems different from
what is required of the craftsman. Photography in this instance had an effect
on the experience of everyday life for these workers. Gilbreths work is a perfect example of the way that Henri Bergson asserted that science attempts to
capture the complexity of vital experience, thereby simplifying it.
In the context of Hamiltons artwork, the people that she calls t he attendants r epresent her ide al vie wers. These attendants a re t he silen t individuals who were put on display in her in stallations and performed simple
tasks such as knitting, sanding mirrors, or sewing over the course of the exhibition. Hamiltons term attendant means one who pays attention. The
poet Rainer Maria Rilke regarded attention as the remains of a lost ideal of
artisanal absorption in work, now exiled to the margins of a mechanized and
routinized world.39 Authentic experience from Rilkes perspective is one component of now-lost artisanal culture. For Hamilton, attentive making can be
the remnant of a collective experience that as an aesthetic experience approximates what has been lost in industrialization. Hamilton has said that the person w ho b est under stood her in stallation myein at t he Venice B iennale in
1999 was in fac t the museum guard who, while protecting the work, spent
hours on end in t he space obs erving the subtle changes of light and movement. In the exhibition of their handwork, Hamilton frames the attentiveness
that these workers brought to their tasks. It is a curious thing to put attentive
labor on display in this way.
Gilbreths photographic met hods mig ht s eem completely antithetical to
Hamiltons presentation of work by attendants because they drain the in-
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F I G U R E 3 . 2 A nn Hamilton, tropos. DIA Center for the Arts, New York, October 7,
1993June 19, 1994. M aterials: translucent industrial glass windows, gravel topped with
concrete, horsehair, table, chair, electric buren, books. Recorded voice: audiotape,
audiotape player, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.
dividual experience of work, abstract it, and generalize it. However, there are
remarkable visual simila rities between the two. Attendants have been included in ten of Hamiltons pieces since 1989. An attendant is often standing
at a table, seated at a table, or on a stool doing a repetitive motion. Their work,
as in Gilbreths films, is presented for the inspection of the observer without
acknowledging t heir p resence. F or in stance, t he mir rors t o b e w orked in
aleph are lifted from the workers left side, sanded until they are useless, and
then moved to the right. The same maneuver occurs in each of Gilbreths factory studies, such as one scene where a woman worker stands at a table and
polishes glycerin bars. It is clear that Hamiltons attendants motions have also
been ca refully s cripted; t hey a re no t hal ting o r hesi tating b ut smo oth a nd
repetitive. Like the factory workers, their work is an abstraction of the pro-
FIGURE
3 . 3 F rank Gilbreth, Lillian B. Gilbreth in Motion Study. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth
Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Smithsonian
Institution.
cess of production, and their work has been photographed and filmed, albeit
for catalogs and c d -r o ms. And in the process of moving, Hamiltons attendants would look more like Gilbreths workers, whose motion, with the help
of the camera, has b een better integrated into the overall system of factory
production and whose bodies have been assimilated to the working rhythm
of machines.
Hamiltons installations of the 1990s do not simply yearn for the fullness of
a preindustrial mode of production. Instead, they allow for a play of tension
between craftsman ideal and factory labor rendered efficient by means of
photographic technologies. Both aspects of the history of labor are evoked in
these works. Hamiltons pieces, just like the former factory spaces in w hich
many of them take place, hark back precisely to that moment in the late nineteenth cen tury w hen ha nd la bor was dis appearing in t he face o f mac hine
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labor, when photography enabled scientists and artists to analyze the body
and its rhythms. There is t herefore a co mplexity in H amiltons work that is
often ignored when it is characterized as a return to preindustrial experience.
The question of relationship between image and experience is referenced historically via the history of labor evoked in Hamiltons installations.
Hamiltons work naturally responds to some of the spaces in w hich it has
been exhibited. These are often the old industrial spaces of cities taken over
when industrial economies faded or changed. In the late 1960s, Reesa Goldberg has noted, for instance, that the space of exhibition for avant-garde art
in New York was transferred from the intimate, home-like atmosphere of the
galleries of the Museum of Modern Art to the industrial warehouses of marginal parts of the city that were found for alternative art spaces. 40 In these
spaces, the artists used the materials they found left over from the buildings
previous lives as small factories, or a disused school in the case of PS1. Hamiltons work s eems to pick up on t he memories embedded in t he b ones of
these buildings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Documenting Hamiltons Work

Many professional p hotographers have do cumented Hamiltons w ork, but
these imag es have ra rely co nveyed t he exp erience o f her spaces. And i t is
important for these images to communicate the work accurately. For an installation artist in the last thirty years, photographs in magazines, in b ooks,
in art history lectures, or on the World Wide Web signify the artist and represent a b ody of work in a g lobal context. Large-scale installations are also
expensive to produce and often require institutional support, which is generated by publicity produced by such images.
Hamiltons work exemplifies the shift in the relationship of installation art
to photography. Catalogs have accompanied many of Hamiltons exhibitions,
and she also has an archive of photographs of each installation that includes
prints and negatives of her installations, although not every one of her pieces
was documented in this manner. When discussing the documentation of her
work and the catalogs that have been published, Hamilton points to budget
and time constraints. Because installation art does not have the profit margin
of something like painting, independent galleries are less willing to invest in
it. The production of a catalog often depends on the resources of the hosting
institution. And often, by the end of a project, she said, the documentation
of work becomes another project in itself.41 The installation produces its own
archive. All o f these factors shape the documentation of the work, the pictures that are taken, and their circulation in the art market.
Hamilton considers any interpretation of her work a type of collaboration,
as e videnced by her c lose working relationship with commentators on her
installations, such as scholars Susan Stewart and Joan Simon. Simon, for instance, spent years not only going to all o f Hamiltons installations but also
putting together a catalogue raisonn of her work in consultation with Hamilton. The Paris-based photographer Thibault Jeanson is Hamiltons preferred
photographer o f her in stallations. Jeanson often p hotographs a rchitectural
interiors f or catalogs a nd magazines. W hile w orking in E urope, Hamilton
saw published in a magazine s ome photographs that Jeanson had t aken of
ahouse in Uppsala, Sweden. The photographs inspired her to take a threehour train ride out of her way to see the house. Some time later, by chance,
Jeansons representative submitted photographs to the Dia Ar t Foundation
in a bid to photograph Hamiltons installation tropos. When Hamilton saw
the photos, which included the Uppsala photographs, she knew that he was
the person to photograph her piece. He has since photographed many of her
installations, including the picture is still and mantle.
For tropos (19931994) at the Dia Art Foundation in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, Hamilton emptied the gallery and turned it into a lightand sound-filled space. She covered the floor in layers of horsehair and set an
attendant a t a small t able in t he cen ter o f t he r oom. The a ttendant had a
heated wire wand and burned away lines of text from a book. As the attendant
worked, the recorded voice of a person with aphasia moved from speaker to
speaker in the space, turning observers as they followed the sound.
When Hamilton met wi th Jeanson at Dia, he s aid t hey s at down in t he
horsehair and talked about various things for an hour or so.42 Then Hamilton
left, and Jeanson recalled that he realized, We didnt talk about the piece. I
dont know what she wants from me. I dont know where Im supposed to go.
Hamilton stated that it is important in interpreting her work that the writer
or photographer both understands her in tentions but also makes the work
his or her own.43 She wants the photographic or textual interpretation to in a
certain sense become, not a contingent object, to use Martha Buskirks phrase,
but something that stands on its own. In this way, the artist might assert, the
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144
photograph becomes someone elses work and is c learly distinguished from

her own.
In describing his work in Hamiltons installations, Jeanson made a distinction between making a document, which he connected to signification, and
producing an illusion. He described his effort to make images of Hamiltons
work as the effort to capture a dream. The ever-changing atmosphere and the
emotions evoked by Hamiltons space for the photographer are more important than the record of concrete objects in the space. Using the metaphor of
tying himself to the mast of a drifting boat, Jeanson said that as a photographer he floats around in the space and watches what happens.
The photographers experience in Hamiltons spaces seems very similar to
the way that Hamilton describes her initial encounter with the site in which
she is going to make a piece and the way she hopes a visitor will encounter
her in stallations. My site visits have a n enormous influence on t he w ork.
Ihave to walk a si tes impression into my body in order to begin working. I
need to register silently all of the impressions your body registers (temperature, smell, light) as felt impressions before I can work. This plentitude of atmospheric information has an enormous influence with how I perceive and
register the words spoken, or the sounds heard.44
Jeanson, in photographing the space, essentially follows the same process
of attentive awareness as Hamiltons attendants. But Jeansons descriptions of
his photographic process in Hamiltons work make it clear that he is tr ying
to capture an experience that encompasses more than mere vision. It is also
clear that the photographs try to go beyond the limits of camera vision.
Jeanson s aid t hat, in H amiltons in stallations, wi thin t he co nstraints o f
time and money, he would spend the first day without the camera. Then, as
he got to know how the space c hanged under gi ven conditions of light, he
would take out the camera and begin making exposures. He uses a la rgeformat camera with an additional viewfinder because the viewfinder on these
large-format ca meras do es no t gi ve a n acc urate s ense o f t he final images
framing. He waits for the perfect moment, the moment that will encapsulate the installation as a whole, and then opens the shutter, depending on the
lighting conditions, for up to forty-five minutes. Given one day of work, he
could take seven to eight exposures.
He p hotographed the p icture is s till. Hamiltons in stallations a t t he time
used minimal light. For instance, ghost: a border act of 2000, which was men-
tioned in t he introduction, was lo cated in a r ecently vacated factory space

inCharlottesville, Virginia. The installation comprised two rooms made of
silk screens, which were suspended from the ceiling and seemed to float in
the space. A lo ng table, a sin gle chair, and a r otating digital projector were
inside each room. The projector cast the image of a pencil drawing a line on
the silk screens and the walls of the factory. The only light in the space was
what came from the projectors. A similar situation took place in the picture is
still, except, in that instance, the only light in the space came from the frosted
glass windows at the front of the gallery, which rendered one side of the space
very bright and the other dark. Although eyes could balance the contrasting
light, t he ca mera co uldnt. F or J eanson, t hese w ere difficult conditions in
which to photograph, and so, for two of the images, he was forced to light the
space so that the image would picture the space the way the eye sees it. Despite his efforts, Jeanson was unhappy with the images that he took and returned to Japan later to try again.
Jeanson always uses a pa norama format when photographing Hamiltons
pieces because, he said, he thinks of them as landscapes rather than interiors.
His use of this format links Hamiltons installation art in interesting ways to
the panorama paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. This wideangle format, even on a p hotographic scale, encourages viewers to imagine
themselves en veloped wi thin a n en vironment. P anorama p hotographs r eproduced at a small s cale do not have the same impact. However, these images approximate natural vision because they include peripheral vision. In the
Jeanson photographs, the viewer gets the sense of being placed in a sp ecific
position within a large illusionistic space.
Panoramas, t heorists have argued, are enjoyable b ecause t hey place t he
viewer in a position to command the space. Painted panoramas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were large, often circular structures painted
in great detail with 360-degree views of cities or battlefields. 45 For viewers,
the sensation of having the world spread out before their feet is part of the
pleasure of looking at these paintings. These image-spaces reconstitute the
centered subject that installation, in some accounts at least, seeks to subvert.
When a photograph is read as the naturalistic depiction of three-dimensional
space it, in effect, opens up the visual field and allows the viewer to command
that space visually. In this situation, rather than being immersed in the space
of the installation, the division between the subject (the person looking at the
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photograph) and the object (the space of the installation) is reinforced. Ther e
is a small difference between many of Jeansons panoramic photographs of
Hamiltons installations and these images. While panorama paintings place
the viewer at a high point in relation to the scene depicted, Jeansons photographs tend to place the viewer in t he thick of installation, the camera lens
always at the height of a body standing upright. In this position, it is as if the
viewer were immersed in the installation. It produces the illusion that we are
eyewitnesses, so to speak, in the space.
It is not so different to photograph an installation than to photograph architecture. Architectural photographers have choices in the interpretation of
an architects work. Some make an effort to understand the architects intention and original vision. When documenting a work, they emphasize the essential formal qualities of a building. Often, this involves editing out incidental signs of use and context, such as vegetation, furniture, and automobiles.
The image condenses the formal qualities of the architecture. Photographers
may have a he avy hand in interpreting the architecture in f ormal terms for
the viewer but at the same time see themselves as stepping out of the way and
letting the architects work speak for itself. Other photographers prefer to emphasize not the concept but the building as a space that has been lived in and
persisted through time, including signs of wear and tear and neglect. Often
the photograph becomes a str ong and subjective interpretation of the photographers reaction to the aura of the space.
In a sp ecial edition of Architecture California devoted to the relationship
between architecture and photography, Wolf Prix points out that photographs
of architecture are inherently inadequate to the experience of a building because viewers cannot sense or see what is b ehind them. In a p hotograph,
ones vision is na rrowed a nd f ragmented.46 And b ecause t he p hotographic
print is two dimensional, the elements in that print are organized according
to the logic of a flat plane or visual field. Photographs always flatten and abstract.47 In looking at a photograph, the viewer is always aware of the distinct
qualities of that two-dimensional object but, if the proper visual signals a re
there, susp ends the limitations of that format enough to imagine t he lived
quality of what the scene depicts.48 Some photographs, of course, do this more
emphatically than others. To frame the issue in s emiotic terms, the viewer
could read certain signs in the photograph as naturalistic, as if the photograph
represents the space of the artwork, as one would experience it first hand. At
the other extreme, one could read the photograph as pure, flat surface. Such
images tend to emphasize the formal qualities of the space and avoid imitating natural vision.
Put simply, all photographers face choices about how they will manipulate
the material conditions in order to make an image. Modernist photographers
of the early twentieth century were delighted with the prospect of divorcing
vision from its seat in the human body. As in modernist painting, some modernist photography acknowledged the flat surface of the photographic print,
producing abstract images with no illusionistic space. These are images that
correlate with monocular rather than binocular vision. Modernist photographers also produced images that in their depth of field exceeded the limits
of natural vision in all-over clarity. The cameras ability to capture visual phenomena that the eye couldnt see, to fragment the visual field, and to flatten
and abstract the visual world opened up aesthetic possibilities for these photographers. But it also produced a kind of disembodied, machine-like vision.
Photographs that imitate natural vision carry the cues that invite the viewer
to read them as dep icting three-dimensional illusionistic space. Thes e cues
can include clear orthogonal lines, natural lighting, and a sense of uncalculated immediacy to the image. The analog photograph is p hysical evidence
ofthe conditions of a certain time and place, or a that has been, as Roland
Barthes says. For this reason, the photograph has a certain amount of authority as document, even as it marks absence. Most installation photographs are
regarded in t his way. Although Hamilton uses the term document to describe the images of her installations, they dont have the aesthetic of documentary photography, although most can accurately be described as naturalistic photographs.
The Catalog For The Picture Is Still

The Akira Ikeda Gallery sponsored the publication of a catalog for the picture is still, which came out in 2003. 49 The book, in keeping with Jeansons
photographs, has a pa norama format of 12 b y 15 inc hes. The photographs
are arranged as a walk-through of the space, opening with an extraordinary
image on the first pages that a viewer to the space probably would not see. It
is a shot of the doorway in which the frosted glass doors have been opened
completely.
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F I G U R E 3 . 4 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still. Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19,
2001May 18, 2002. M aterials: projected video image: 35 1/2 x 46 inch steel grid, thread,
charcoal, video with sound, speakers. Photo credit: Thibault Jeanson. Courtesy of the Ann
Hamilton Studio.
The exterior walls of the warehouse building are flush with the surface of
the page, and within the gap produced by the opened door, the exposed cloud
of charcoal branches and the torpedo tunnels recede in the gloom.
The average viewer of the installation did not have this perspective on the
piece, but it is an apt visual metaphor for the artists intentions for the installation. There is t he startling contrast between the ordinary building and its
gloomy, almost eerie interior. It is a visual met aphor for excavation and discovery, the sense of a past that is present but invisible. As the image abstracts
and encapsulates the meaning of the installation, it also divorces itself from
the bodily experience of the space. In this sense, the photograph reveals its
function as an opaque signifier, even as it appears to be a window. The startling opening of depth within the flat surface of the page is reminiscent of a
Gordon Matta-Clark piece Pier In/Out (1973). It is also a suggestion of what
will be a play of tension between abstraction and naturalism in photographs
of the site.
Not all o f the photographs in t he catalog function this way. The opening
photographs work to give the catalog reader the sense of having just entered
the space. On the second title page, a panoramic photograph of the branches
of charcoal by Tetsuo Ito fills up both pages. The shot has been taken from
the dep th o f a t orpedo c hannel lo oking u p a t t he mass o f b ranches f rom
below, while a steel I-beam has been positioned to be in the pages gutter. The
branches are densely packed, filling the limits of the picture frame, going from
edge to edge, and thereby flattening out the image. This is a space t hat the
viewer cannot imagine entering. It is a visual space.
Another functions to give viewers a striking sense of a great space opening
up before them. The entire space from the head of the channel follows the steel
I-beams as they recede into the space. Strong orthogonals guide the viewers
eye into depths of the left tunnel where the video p rojection is j ust visible.
The viewer is drawn irresistibly into an illusionistic, three-dimensional space.
The images by Jeanson move the viewer from the position at the front of
the gallery down the side of the channel, with the camera hovering just below
the mass o f charcoal. The images, in pa norama format, are all in b lack and
white and take up both pages. In each, the branches look as if they are a solid
form in the space. The final image of this trio shatters this illusion. The camera
looks across the gallery space again, but this time it has been placed among
the branches of charcoal, which swarm around it.
149
FIGURE
3 . 5 G ordon Matta-Clark, Pier In/Out, 1973. 2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
F I G U R E 3 . 6 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19,
Hamilton Studio.
In this image, the camera is sur rounded, and only a few of the branches
are in focus, almost like natural vision. It is the kind of picture that gives the
viewer the sense of being immersed in the space. Jeanson, at times, decides to
make a bad picture because it more accurately captures the experience of the
space. In this sense, the image signifies an embodied vision, which has limits.
In the p icture is s till, he allo wed s ome of t he imag es t o b e b urnt or overexposed on the sunlit side of the space, while the darker side flattened out
with the branches turned into an inky, black pool. These images do mimic
the appearance of the space w hen one looked to the bright door from the
dark side of the room.
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152
F I G U R E 3 . 7 A nn Hamilton, the picture is still, Akira Ikeda Gallery, Taura, Japan, May 19,
Hamilton Studio.
Jeansons description of his process seems quite similar to Hamiltons ideas

and descriptions of the ideal viewers experience in her w ork. Hamilton attempts to anchor viewers in their bodies, to make them aware of their sensations and the way the body uses those sensations to interpret a space. In the
effort to capture that experience, camera vision also tries to become embodied. However, it never quite works that way. In the catalog, the photographs
shift between emphasizing the depth of field, the openness of space, and the
sense of being immersed, and drawing out those formal qualities of the installation that make interesting pictures, that is, the formal play of horizontal and vertical lines that work with or against the frame and flatness of the
printed page. Where Gilbreths use of photographs and film sought to simplify the complexity of lived experience, Jeansons photographs try to recapture that complexity.
These are the photographers, catalog designers, and the artists deliberate
choices in photographic styles. There are a remarkable variety of photographic
strategies designed to give the viewer an authentic sense of what it was like to
be in the installation. Compared to the catalogs for the Rooms exhibition and
even Matta-Clarks Splitting, the photography and design o f the catalog for
the picture is still is far more complex. Like the PS1 catalog, the photographs
lead the viewer through the space, giving a sense of the passage of time. And
like Matta-Clarks, they mimic the way one turns ones head in different directions as one moves. However, there are more ways of depicting these aspects
of a space in t he Akira Ikeda catalog. The higher-quality color photographs
and their size enhance the variety of photographic strategies.
The difference b etween t he Rooms catalog and the picture is s till catalog
marks a shift in the requirements of the art market in the 1970s and the 1980s.
The conventions of catalog photography dictated the style of the photographs
of her installations. As installation art has been taken up into better-funded
art institutions, the style and quality of photographs have changed considerably in the last thirty-five years. One can compare the catalog of the picture is
still to that produced by PS1s Rooms in 1976. The Rooms publication with its
grainy, low-production, black-and-white images look as if t hey could be reproduced in a newspaper. The images of Hamiltons installation the picture is
still, by contrast, have the quality of a photographers book or the high-quality
layouts of architectural magazines.
Because most of the installation art of the late 1960s and early 1970s was
produced b y y oung a rtists w hose w ork was no t y et s ought a fter b y ma instream galleries, it was no t as sub ject to commercial pressures. Along with
their interest in de-aest heticizing art practice, many artists in t his position
had little reason to spend the money to document an installation extensively.
And, for s ome artists, ephemeral work need no t b e preserved to t he s ame
extent because the experience itself was the focus. As Allan Kaprow argued,
what could a photograph capture about such an experience?50 For the small
group of insiders who saw the work in i ts original state, the photograph or
the video serves merely to jog personal memory. But for those who come after,
the photograph becomes an iconic sign of an exclusive event.51 It becomes a
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contingent object that signifies a moment in time within the institution of art
history. This realization on the part of art institutions and galleries has placed
pressure to produce exhibition catalogs that sustain interest and represent an
artists work accurately.
And Yet, Photographs Are Never Enough

It is interesting that Hamiltons inspiration for the picture is still, and her exploration of the issue of agency, came from looking at a photograph and concluding it is impossible to understand history from an image. It is something
that she deals with in her installations all of the time. Because she never repeats an installation, the majority of her audience encounters images of her
work before it ever sees one of her installations in the flesh. Each of her pieces
is usually specific to and inspired by the site in which they have been made.
Only parts of her work, such as mechanical objects or individual tables, have
traveled to different venues. The photographs of Hamiltons installations are
documentation, according to the artist.52 And almost every one of her installations has been beautifully photographed.
Installation art, for the most part, seeks to produce an immersive, embodied experience and, not only an immersive experience, but also a situation in
which the boundary between subject and object is nearly breached. For her
part, Hamilton points out that much of her w ork has b een about exploring
boundaries and investigating the possibility of their rupture. In order to appreciate this aspect of her work, it is necessary to be enveloped by it. Photographs cant achieve this effect of being enveloped in a space , nor can they
imitate the sound of charcoal chiming in the wind.
This is the inherent defect of two-dimensional images as documentation
of three-dimensional spaces in real time. Robert Morris notes that, in viewing a photograph, one is always removed from the moment in which it was
taken while, at the same time, ones body is outside the place that it depicts.
One must always project oneself into the photograph and connect the twodimensional object to the three-dimensional space i t depicts. Photography,
as Amelia Jones notes, is never enough. For Morris, spatial arts, in which I
would include installation art, should elude the stifling grasp o f the photograph. It is of course space- and time-denying photography that has been so
malevolently effective in shifting an entire cultural perception away from the
reality of time in a rt that is lo cated in space .53 Morris sees photography as

homogenizing experience, transforming it into easily consumed units. In the
new spatial arts, by contrast, the viewer is surrounded by the work. The experience, which engages the I mode, is imageless. It cannot be pictured or
represented, or can be so only in a way that deceives.
For Morris, the I aspect of the viewer in one of his pieces is the self as it
is poised at the tip of times arrow. This is the self in the moment of direct
experience without memory, language, or reflection. Any reflection, judgment, or associations that emerge after that initial moment shift consciousness into the me aspect.54 Morris, in this essay, favors the I mode of experience, and his simple objects of the early to mid-1960s with their uninflected
dull sur faces a nd sim ple sha pes a re in tended t o dis courage vie wers f rom
thinking about metaphoric relationships or allusions and to engage them instead in a r eflection on t heir immediate p erceptions. Morris des cribes t he
shift into the me mode of engagement, into transformative representations,
such as language and images, as the entrance of noise into the system. Immediate, li ved exp erience w ould s eem t o b e exp erience b efore i t is s ocial,
before it circulates among different people. The me mode is the beginning of
the representational process that transfers this direct experience into memory,
language, and pictures. It is the stage at which direct experience is grasped by
social structures and, E. P. Thompson might argue, becomes ideological.
This is o ne of t he reasons photography was tr oubling to Allan Kaprow.
Kaprow t hought t he p hotograph co uld no t ca pture t he ac tual exp erience
ofan event, and he also believed they could only be rather weak substitutes.
And like many artists working with ephemeral objects and experiential art
forms in the 1960s and 1970s, he under stood the photograph as extraneous
and superfluous to his real work. Photographs appear as integral parts of
afew of Kaprows Happenings and gestures but often in a wa y that points
out the inadequacy of the photograph. He noticed that it was impossible for
people in his events and activities to refrain from posing for the photographs,
which disrupted the spontaneity of the Happening.55
Kaprow spoofs the photographic document in his piece Transfer (1968). In
Transfer, Kaprow directed participants to stack oil and chemical barrels in
various configurations at sites around Middletown, Connecticut, and spray
paint them a different color at each site. After each construction and painting, Kaprow had participants pose in an obvious way for a triumphal photo-
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graph. A ccording t o J eff K elley, K aprow was p ointing o ut t he a rt w orlds

need for photographs and images of these events that were meant to be experienced. These images, which are set-up, hokey reactions to the Happening,
play up the distance between experience and image that Kaprow wanted to
avoid in his w ork. Ro land B arthes des cribes t he p rocess o f b eing p hotographed as one in which the subject is mortified and rendered an object, even
a museum object.56 Kaprows later projects were often deliberately unphotographable or, at least, unsatisfying as images, involving slow and invisible
processes, such as wetting and drying stones, breathing into a partners mouth,
or exchanging buckets of dirt.
Kaprow also used the photograph to point out the absence that is an inherent part of t he photograph. In Six Ordinary Happenings, Kaprow u sed t he
photograph as evidence of a tiny event that had already taken place. For Giveaway, a part of Six Ordinary Happenings, stacks of dishes were arranged in
impromptu still-life groups on street corners and then photographed. The
next day, the empty street corners were then photographed. In this project,
absence (of dishes) was em bedded in t he structure of the photograph. But
this particular Happening also pointed out the absence of lived experience
in the photograph itself or the transformation of experience into something
else. The photograph becomes a poor substitute for the original activity.
Rather than avoiding having her work documented by photographs, however, Ann Hamilton has chosen to explore the representation of bodily experience in photographs in a new project.
Embodied Images: Hamiltons Photographs

The photographs desire is not to signify at all costs; nor to witness or inform. It is
moreof a shock or illusion. Or a disappearance as well, because if something wants
tobe come an image, it is not to endure but to better disappear. (my translation)57
Jean Baudrillard, from Sommes-Nous? 58
In the Jean Baudrillard quotation above, from a chapter in a r ecent book of

contemporary p hotography, he a rgues t hat p hotography is no t a bout wi tnessing. He proposes that things want to be photographed not so they endure
but rather so they can better disappear. In photography, the body disappears
behind the image. It becomes a sp ecter. As demonstrated in t he catalog by
Akira Ikeda, photographs of Hamiltons installations tend to be naturalistic

images that imitate illusionistic space or formal abstractions. Each style represents a f orm o f dis embodied visio n, in t he mo de o f flat, visual space o r
monocular vision. C an t he more ineffable asp ects of b odily exp erience b e
captured in a photograph?
Hamilton explores this in a series of portrait photographs titled face to face,
which she began in the late 1990s. The project consists of a series of pinhole
photographs of close associates. Hamilton has made a series of these images
using f riends, fa mily, a nd p eople wi th w hom she has w orked o n p rojects.
This group of pictures combines images and experience in a way that illuminates the complicated relationship between representation and experience in
Hamiltons work.
These images explore the limits to representing bodily experience in photographs. They do s o by embedding the chemical and even the mechanical
process of photography in the body and rendering the experience shared by
the sitter and photographer. For the sitter, the process involves the uncanny
sensation of being stilled and observed by another. In a certain sense, these
photographs are like her installations in that one gains a unique perspective
on them by experiencing them first hand. In this case, first hand means being
photographed by the artist.
Hamilton p hotographed me in a gr ungy pa rking lo t in Cha rlottesville,
Virginia, in 2000, w hen she came to the University of Virginia to make the
installation ghost: a border act. The experience was acutely uncomfortable as
it involved staring at the artists mouth at close range for thirty seconds or
more. For this series of images, Hamilton made a set of simple pinhole cameras by p oking a ho le in a p lastic film canister in w hich she had lo dged a
single frame of unexposed film. She then put the film canister in her mouth
and had me st and dir ectly in f ront o f her o nly inc hes f rom her face a nd
opened her lips in order to expose the film. Because I am slightly taller than
Hamilton, I had to hold still and peer down into her mouth for what felt like
an extrao rdinarily lo ng time . Once t he exp osure was co mplete, H amilton
closed her mo uth/the shutter, t hen removed t he canister f rom her mo uth,
and covered the small pinhole with a piece of tape until the film was ready to
be developed.
In some ways, the experience of being photographed in t his manner was
probably similar to what it was like for those first daguerreotype sitters who
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had to be restrained by devices long enough for their images to be captured

by t he s ensitized p hotographic p late. However, t he exp erience in t his cas e
was made more uncomfortable since I was p laced in close proximity to another human being. I was not looking at her eyes but, in fact, staring at part
of her face that one usually doesnt look at for very long. In this sense, I was
both in t he presence of another being and looking at her in a n objectifying
way. I was also aware that she had an equally good view of my face. In fact, she
had time to study my face and to realize, I felt, that I was trying to act relaxed
and hide my posture but failing miserably. Needless to say, it was amusing but
uncomfortable.
When Hamilton showed me t he result of the exposure, she s aid she was
pleased with it b ecause my uncer tainty and vulnerability was p lain to s ee
onmy face. In the image, it seems as if I a m peering with trepidation into a
watery, eye-shaped hole. Hamilton explains that the human figure, the sitter,
in the image takes the place of the pupil in t he eye. Hamilton writes, The
resulting image is a trace p resence of the time of standing or sitting face to
face with a person or landscape. The figure or landscape becomes the pupil
in the eye shape created by my mouth, much the same way as one sees a tiny
image of oneself in t he reflection of another persons pupil.59 The image is
blurry and ringed by the smudged outline of Hamiltons lips, which happen to
look like the edge of eyelids. In each print, the image is distorted as the light
rays were bent by the pinhole. Some images are clouded. Others are sharp,
depending o n ho w much t he si tter mo ved as t he film was exp osed. S ome
people smile. Others stare. In other images, you can tell that the two participants couldnt keep from laughing.
Each is t he record of the encounter between two bodies and, more than
just bodies, two faces. The length of time for each exposure and the tension
that builds up during that time s eem to be infused into the image. At the
same time, the images illustrate one of Hamiltons principle interests the
transposition of the senses. In this case, eyes become mouths and mouths
become eyes. In essence, she is trying to make the notion of embodied vision
literal by embedding vision in a part of the body that touches and tastes but
does not see. Hamiltons photographs slow down vision by anchoring it in
thebody, creating the illusion that one can see someone seeing. We are both
inside the seeing subject and outside at the same time. These images thicken
the flat surface of the photograph in the process, so that the image conveys in
F I G U R E 3 . 8 A nn Hamilton, face to face, 41, 51, 58, 2001. M edium: pigment print in wood
frame. Edition: 3 with 2 Artists Proofs (each). Photo credit: Courtesy of the Ann Hamilton Studio.
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some sense the experience of seeing and being seen. In this way, Hamiltons
pinhole photographs work against the disembodied, instantaneous quality of
vision found in most photographs.
In her recent book Self/Image, Amelia Jones describes photographic practice as emerging from the desire to see and know from a single point of view.
She t hen goes on to connect t his to t he mo dern ideology of t he singular,
centered, male artist as genius.60 The photograph as document is connected
to the production of this subject in Western culture, as it satisfies the demand
to s ee and know. In t his relationship, t he object of photographic vision is
rendered legible according to the knowledge disciplines of Western culture,
while the viewing subject is invisible and illegible and, therefore, escapes the
grasp of these disciplines.
However, Jones argues that Western philosophy is incorrect when it identifies a dic hotomy between perceiving subject and perceived object insofar
asit ignores the ways that subjects are produced through images. The Western subject, she a rgues, is p roduced in t he structures of representation that
developed d uring a nd a fter t he Rena issance, inc luding p hotography. S he
points to Jane C opjecs argument regarding Renaissance painting in w hich
she argues that classical Renaissance painting, which depicts a clarified threedimensional, illusionistic space based on one-point perspective describes not
the visual world per se but rather the drive to see. For this reason, not only is
vision in this space not disembodied, but also the image includes and constitutes the body, and vice v ersa. The viewer/subject emerges from within the
image. The boundaries of subject and object, in images, are woven together
in complicated ways.
Jones extends this argument to new imaging technologies, such as video.
Working from the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans theory of the screen, Jones
describes t he video s creen as em bodied or as fleshed. In p erformance ar t
documented by video, t he s creen b ecomes a p oint o f p hysical co ntact b etween the viewers body and the artists. In the work of someone like the Swiss
video a rtist P ipilotti Rist, t he str ict di vision b etween sub ject a nd ob ject is
broken down as one watches the video. The viewer and the artists body are
both immersed and subsumed by the screen.61 Video, Jones argues, becomes
a form of haptic visuality or the mixture of sight and touch.62
In Roland Barthess late work Camera Lucida, he exa mines photography
from the point of view of the desiring viewer rather than the critic: Every
time I would read something about Photography, I would think of some photograph that I loved, and this made me furious. Myself, I saw only the referent, the desired object, the beloved body.63 Barthes describes the photography as fleshy, something that captures experience and evokes affect. Camera
Lucida is a phenomenological study of the photograph as an object that engages the body from the mechanical clicking sound of the camera shutter
release to the sensation of being pierced by the photograph. The punctum is
the detail that ruptures the ordinary reading of a photograph drawn from the
cultural codes available to the viewer, which Barthes describes as the studium.
It is the punctum that penetrates the viewers body, while the studium remains
respectfully at a dist ance: What I ca n na me ca nnot r eally p ierce me . The
incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.64
Barthes sug gests t hat t here is a n ineffable asp ect of exp erience t hat t he
image can capture. He links p hotographs, in t his way, not only to desiring
bodies but also to death. In a famous passage, Barthes describes the way that
photographs mortify the body by demanding the sitter pose for the camera.
In t he process, he obs erves, the Photograph (t he one I in tend) represents
that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a sub ject w ho f eels he is b ecoming a n object: I t hen exp erience a
micro-version of death (parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.65 In the
process of becoming image, one shifts from subject to object.
Hamiltons photographs involve the experience of the gaze of another from
the position of the person looking and the person being looked at. In the case
of H amiltons p inhole p hotographs, t he p hotographer a nd t he si tter sha re
these positions. The tension between subject and object is heightened in this
work. The photographs record the oscillation between subject and object in
the act of capturing the image. Hamilton sees her work shift and turn on the
point that Barthes describes where bodily experience shifts to image, subject
turns to object, and experience becomes sign. I t is t he same point beyond
which Robert Morris did not want the spatial arts to go. Hamiltons work in
this way is distinguished from Morriss spatial arts. Hamiltons work explores
the limits of these positions, trying to uncover what is held in common when
these boundaries are breached.
This is perhaps why Hamilton cites Helne Cixouss 1991 book Coming to
Writing as one of the works that has been most influential for her. Cixouss
essay is a poetic recounting of her experience as a woman who has an almost
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physical urge to write. The urge is expressed precisely in the multiplicity and
fragmentation of language. In her w ork, the body and the senses are taken
apart and transformed into text:
Maybe I have written to see; to have what I never would have had; so that
having would be the privilege not of the hand that takes and encloses, of the
gullet, of the gut; but of the hand that points out, of fingers that see, that
design, from the tips of the fingers that transcribe by the sweet dictates of
vision. . . . Writing to touch with letters, with lips, with breath, to caress with
the tongue, to lick with the soul, to taste the blood of the beloved body, of life
in its remoteness; to saturate distance with desire.66
Writing for Cixous is a n acknowledgment of distance and desire, but it

is at t he s ame time t he process in w hich subject b ecomes material object
andthe object produces the subject. In the marks on the page, a new body is
created, which encompasses and surpasses her identity as a J ewish woman.
Hamiltons pinhole photographs in disp lacing the senses seek to intertwine
viewing subject and viewed object in a manner similar to what Amelia Jones
suggests in her a nalysis of self and image. Hamiltons pinhole photographs
make sensible, rather than just visible, the process of seeing and the desire to
see. As Mary Ann Doane noted, But it is finally in the new representational
technologies of vision photography, the cinema that one witnesses the
insistency o f t he im possible desir e t o r epresent to a rchive the p resent.67 In the moment one tries to grasp the present, the moment of seeing,
the archival impulse emerges. Hamiltons images reinforce the fact that vision
is always embodied and limited. But they also reveal how much bodily experience is intertwined with and framed by images.
Experience and Image

This chapter has lo oked at installations that appeal to an experience that is
available through the body and that requires the viewers direct experience
of the piece. Installation art that requires the viewers direct participation and
bodily presence partakes in a notion of John Deweys description of experience. According to Dewey, in the dynamic interaction between observer and
environment, each shapes the other. And in the process, each is transformed,
having gained something new. The development of installation into a famil-
iar global genre in a rt is link ed to the interest and desire for extraordinary
experiences. Ann Hamiltons explanation for the appeal of her work might be
that her installations ground the viewers consciousness in her body in a way
that our culture and contemporary environment no lo nger requires but for
which we long.
Installations such as these that focus on bodily experience, including Ann
Hamiltons, Ric hard S erras a nd o thers, s eem t o def y r ecording b y p hotograph. Something is missing in t he images of these works and, in t hat lack,
the viewer longs for the full experience. Hamiltons work is in teresting because it explores t he tension b etween image and exp erience. And in s ome
ways it is because these works cannot be captured adequately in photography
that t hey a re fas cinating a nd all uring. L ike B enjamins ide as o f t he r itual
objects and the power of aura, these works require pilgrimages to really see
them. Thus, even as the experience of these works escapes capture by images,
it never completely excludes or ignores the photograph but is in fact framed
by it. Each of these works produces an archive that represents the desire to
grasp lived experience.
The in stallations t hat appeal t o dir ect b odily exp erience ul timately p roduce their own archives, in the form of photographs and catalogs.68 The catalogs and images of these works bring them into the realm of art history. The
photographs will ul timately be the memory of these installations, will p rovide the jumping-off point for future histories of this genre, and as we saw
inchapter 1, t hey will shape our understanding of these installations in the
future. In the next c hapter, we will lo ok at installations in w hich the nowoutmoded media o f analog film and photography have become part of the
subject matter of installation art.
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FOUR
camera obscura
M E M O R Y I N F I L M A N D V I D E O I N S TA L L AT I O N S I N T H E
2000S
For me, making a film is connected to the idea of loss and disappearance.
Tacita Dean
The installations in t his chapter address the sensuous aspects of outmoded

analog media and raise questions about how these forms of technology have
shaped experience and now shape memory. These installations are archival
in the sense that they interrogate the representation of history and memory,
but t hey als o draw o n t he materiality a nd s ensuous asp ects o f t hese nowoutmoded f orms o f r ecording. In Rene G reens w ork, t he slide sho w a nd
other outmoded forms of media, such as vinyl l ps and Super 8 footage, have
been used as part of the material of her installations and films because they
mark cer tain time p eriods. According t o Andr eas Huyssen, The issue o f
media is central to the way we live structures of temporality in our culture.1
These forms of media fascinate at the moment of their obsolescence because
they mark a shift in t he way we remember and in t he archival objects we
produce.
It may be useful to consider these materials using Sherry Turkles notion of
evocative objects. She defines evocative objects as those things that because
they are s o integral to daily ac tivities have b ecome part of our emotional
andthinking lives. We think with the objects we love. We love the objects
we t hink with, she ass erts.2 The fas cination with outmoded media in t he
form of film and recordings of various kinds r epresented in t hese installations is due to the fact that these media, which produce anxiety and excitement when first introduced, have now become familiar and beloved objects.
Their appearance as art objects also suggests an interest in how time is measured and memory is exp erienced at the end o f the twentieth century and
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into the twenty-first this moment when analog photography is giving way
to digital.
Tacita Deans film Kodak presents the artists feeling of melancholy at the
passage of analog film. Nostalgia may be the word to describe this curiosity
with the outmoded, but nostalgia has been a disdained response to change in
modernity. However, these works suggest that the nostalgia evoked provides
a way to think about the transformations of technology and memory and the
social effects of these media at the end o f the twentieth century. The works
discussed in this chapter engage the viewers body in the materiality of these
now-obsolete media, in viting us t o r eflect o n memo ry a nd ep hemerality
through our affective reaction to these materials. Analog film and photography now spark bodily memory. I will be discussing the work of Tacita Dean,
Matthew Buckingham, and Tony Cokes. In the film installations of Matthew
Buckingham and Tacita Dean, the emphasis remains on the sensuous experience of film as a no w-outmoded medium. In the video installation of Tony
Cokes, however, the flattening effect of digital photographic media is used to
create a distanced perspective from which the viewer can reflect on the social
effects of technology.
Endings: Tacita Deans Kodak

Tacita Deans film Kodak, produced in 2006, is a medi tation on the passing
of16 mm film as a widely available medium. Dean takes as her subject matter
the production of Kodak film at one of the few remaining plants in France,
which was s cheduled to cease production shortly after she made her p iece.
Running at forty-four minutes, Kodak consists of shots of three to four minutes in w hich the camera is fixed and focused on a piece of equipment or a
corridor in the plant. The only sound is the ambient sound of the plant the
hiss of the air ducts, the slosh of chemicals in vats, and the whir of the rollers
that guide the plastic film as it moves through the machines.
Deans film begins by showing us t he factory as if i t were an empty stage
set. She composes the shots in a manner that recalls photographs by Charles
Sheeler or Walker Evans3 or perhaps Bernd and Hilla Becher, the pair of salvagers who sought to preserve the industrial architecture of Western Europe
in their photographs. We see a large drum and a sloping piece of metal. A line
of fluorescent lights cuts across the top of the frame. The image is static and
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conveys the sense that these monolithic machines were intended to be there
for centuries. However, we know that they will soon be idle ruins. And ruin
is one of the key terms used to describe Deans fascination with her subject
matter.4
Kodak folds in on itself, as the artist uses some of the last film produced by
the French Kodak plant to make it. The work in this way is a film that elegizes
its own dis appearance. The piece als o has a c lassical str ucture, as i t t akes
place over the course of a single day of production at the plant. This is t he
same str ucture found in p ieces t hat record t heir own production, such as
process art where the time and procedure of the works making is inscribed
into the body of the work.
Deans film has a sense of melancholy that reflects her reluctance to let this
medium of art making go. She was born in Canterbury, England, in 1965 and
attended Falmouth School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. She came
to filmmaking early, having been given a Standard 8 camera when she was a
child.5 Filmmaking was part of the family history, as Deans grandfather Basil
Dean began the Ealing Film Studios. Perhaps because of this childhood history, her 16 mm films focus on history and the passage of time, such as the
film of the setting sun (The Green Ray, 2001) or the contradictions of history,
as in the strange relics of a futuristic boat of the 1960s (Teignmouth Electron,
2000). And, like Green, Dean too has addressed Robert Smithsons work in
her pieces.
In surprising ways, the subject matter of Deans work parallels that of Rene
Greens. As Hal Foster noted, both artists works can be considered a form of
archival practice. Serial structures appear in each artists work. In fact, Deans
artists book Floh (2001) is dependent on a serial structure and the ability of the
viewer to produce meaning from a set of photographs. If Greens work employs
the serial structure of the slide show as a memory ritual, Deans employs the
photo album, another quintessential format for displaying private photographs.
But where the photographs in Greens work have a personal history to which
we as viewers are privy, Deans photographs are homeless and silent.
The pictures in this book were collected from flea markets and junk shops
while Dean was tra veling. We see in t hem the same patterns that one sees
inall family snapshots: images of prized possessions, vacations, and notable
moments the kind o f t hings t hat w e as co nsumers have b een t aught t o
photograph, as I noted in chapter 2. But we also have a sense of what catches
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Deans eye, which includes strange images, such as a butterfly resting on a snow
bank or photographs of the singing group The Osmond Family taken froma
television screen.6 As in Greens work, the sequence seems to be important
but we struggle to draw the connections from one image to the next. Sometimes t hey s eem formal, s ometimes t hematic, and at other times t he only
connection seems to be stark contrast. Deans work invites us to draw connections between the sequences of images. But these are unheimlich images
so familiar but also inexplicable. They form a kind of uncanny archive that
records an image of the human world, as Jean-Christophe Royoux says.7
Both Rene Green and Tacita Dean are interested in how history and memory are made a nd the effects of each. B oth spin narratives that bring their
artistic p ersonae into play as p rotagonists. E ach of t hem has made a w ork
about Robert Smithsons work in which the notion of pilgrimage and ruin is
involved. Dean chose Spiral Jetty and made a s ound piece that recorded her
search for the piece (Searching for Spiral Jetty, 1997).8 However, although she
is an archival artist, she rarely produces installations that mimic archives the
way Green has done. Instead, the installation format enters her work mostly
via film and film projection, and as wi th all o f the pieces discussed in t his
chapter, sound is an important aspect of her work.
Endings are a perennial theme in Deans work.9 She focuses on the end of
futuristic dreams in the 1960s and demonstrates how strange it is to see the
failed or obsolete future in ruins something like Walter Benjamins notion
of the wish image. Walter Benjamins concept of the wish image represents
the unfulfilled collective hopes for the future latent in a ma nufactured object. The wish image arises in response to dissatisfying social conditions and
is created by reaching back to a mo re distant past in o rder to break from
conventional forms. It is w hen the wish imag es future-oriented nature is
not realized when, as S usan Buck-Morss s ays, it remains unconscious, a
dream that the wish image turns into a fetish. In the fetish, the wish is perceived by the collective to have been actualized, and the impetus for change
is nullified.10 It is the strangeness of the historical artifact, its evocative quality, that intrigues us and allows the viewer a moment to reflect on historical
changes and endings. Hal Foster writes of Dean, and the others he names
archival artists, Archival artists seek to make historical information, often lost
or displaced, physically present.11 This physicality is the important aspect of
these pieces, as they call on bodily memory.
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Although D eans w orks t hemselves a re f ragments, t hey ha ve a unified

structure and focus on a single event, which has a beginning and ending. In
studying single objects, a sin gle phenomenon, site, or person, Deans films
and other pieces have a w holeness t hat Greens do es not pretend to have.
There is too in Deans work an unapologetic melancholy that Greens tends
to eschew.
The film Kodak exemplifies the qualities of unity, silence, and melancholy
in Deans work. At certain points in Kodak, the factory seems to be a window
on the past. The plant itself is da ted, and we can see in t he bones of its old
machines and outmoded control boards that what had been considered the
latest in tw entieth-century technology is now archaic. The factory fills with
technicians who move carts around and arrange plastic sheets o n spindles
totransport to other parts of the factory. At one point, the camera focuses on
a ma n w earing a w hite j umpsuit. Glo ves a re sho ved ca relessly in his bac k
pocket while he is performing some kind of operation at a console among a
field of illuminated buttons. The scenes in the factory, such as this one, have
the atmosphere of t he 1960s that moment in time in w hich t he utopian
future seemed just at hand, when modernity seemed to have triumphed. In
this realization, there is a sur prising recognition that this time o f hope has
passed. This surprise includes the way labor is depicted in the film. The skilled
factory labor that goes into making the film product, the carefully regulated
breaks taken by workers, and the rhythm of production at the factory, which
moves at an unfamiliar pace, seem alien to the twenty-first-century, middleclass art viewer.
However, it is the materiality of the raw plastic that seems to intrigue the
artist most. At certain points, the movie shifts to color. The factory is darkened. Light shines through the back of layers of plastic as they move over the
spindles. The edges form shimmering lines like pink water rippling in the air.
In the darkness it is t he sounds that take over: the rhythmic squeaks of the
equipment and the air rushing through the vents. The camera dimly observes
people moving in the dark and focuses on workers. An employee takes a reel
of film base off the equipment and replaces it with an empty spindle. As the
plastic moves across rollers and from one machine to the next, it looks like
water cascading down a surface or a field of glowing color fixed in the air. In
its early stages, the plastic is t hick like taffy and at points takes on a b right
cerulean hue that looks like pure color.
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F I G U R E 4 . 1 Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. Film installation; 16 mm color and black-andwhite film. Courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Then, suddenl y, d ull, b rown paper r eplaces t he film. The space c hanges
from transparent and glowing to dull, strict, sculptural lines. It turns out that
Dean has chosen one of the days in t he year in w hich the factory lights are
turned on and paper is run through the equipment. The paper shoots down
across the spindles, revealing how fast t he plastic was ac tually moving. In a
long shot, it descends down into the depths of the factory like a snake flying
through the machine, going into the depth of the factory space. In another
sequence, shot in black-and-white film, the viewer sees the paper edge on. It
transforms back into a transparent substance that once again resembles water
streaking do wn t he sur face o f t he s creen. The p ink r eemerges, r eturning
color to the dim space, as the paper slips away.
Then the workers seem to be withdrawing from the factory space. This is
the end of the workday. In the corridor, people are passing and chatting. Some
have coats on. Some give kisses on both cheeks to their fellow employees. As
the corridor fills up, we can hear people whistling and punching their time
cards. They are going home.
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F I G U R E 4 . 2 Tacita Dean, Kodak, 2006. Film installation; 16 mm color and black-andwhite film. Courtesy of the Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Soon the factory is empty. The machines are still. The camera focuses on
adeserted loading area with arrows painted on the pavement. Abandoned
office chairs range across a vaca nt hangar with faded n umbers on the wall.
Broken signs hang on chains from the ceiling. Unwound from spindles, film
bits litter the floor. We see a dirty production area, an empty, illuminated corridor. The arrows painted on the walls le ad us out of the factory and to the
end of the piece: a room littered with odds and ends of film and debris. Film
itself has become waste material, as the screen goes dark.
In first decade of the twenty-first century, the Kodak Company has begun
to cease or scale back the manufacture of various products related to analog
film and photography, as digital media have begun to take over. During the
1990s and 2000s, various corporations released new versions of digital scanners, digital cameras, and digital projectors with increasingly high resolution
and color quality. In response, in 2004, Kodak ceased the manufacture of film
slide p rojectors, a nd in 2005, t he co mpany ce ased makin g K odachrome
Super 8 film. M eanwhile, K odak has als o b egun makin g digi tal p roducts
and acquiring companies that do so. In 2009, the company stopped making
Kodachrome 64 film, which is the last of the Kodachrome products. Devel-
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opment services for this film were only available through December 2010.
Although 16 mm film i s s till a vailable, i t will be o nly per haps a s pecialty
product, relegated to the realm of fine art.12
Deans film is a point of reference for this chapter because it demonstrates
how our relationships to the technologies that were seen to transform experience and memory at the beginning of the twentieth century have now changed.
The viewers responses to these outmoded media references a once-familiar,
scripted social experience that has become defunct. The works discussed in
this chapter, which include Tony Cokess Headphones (2004), a nd Matthew
Buckinghams Situation Leading to a Story (1999), present different possibilities for involving viewers in the physical encounter with analog media that are
now part of the experiential aspect of installation art, to reflect on the shaping of memory in the twentieth century.
When the film Kodak was exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 2007,
it was disp layed in a ho me-like atmosphere in a r oom with carpeted floors
and soft armchairs. As James Quandt notes, Dean deliberately places the projector in such a way that one can hear the sound of film as it whirs through
the machine, a sound oddly antique.13 Dean, he notes, refuses to show her
films in a traditional cinema format. Instead, she prefers installations where
viewers can move around. At the Guggenheim Museum, the projector was
placed in a room separate from the projection, but one could still hear the fan
and the sound of the projector as it moved. The arrangement highlighted the
flickering quality of 16 mm p rojected film in a n atmosphere that was da rk
and inviting, familiar to those of a cer tain generation, but also somber because the work represented the passing of this recent period in hist ory, the
era of analog. Even the practice of watching an analog film will soon be relegated to the arena of fine art.
Moving Images as Installation Art

In the closed space of cinema there is no movement, no circulation, and no exchange.
Inthe dark, visitors sink into their seats as though sinking into bed. The cinema becomes acocoon, inside of which a crowd of relaxed, idle bodies is fixed, hypnotized
bysimulations of reality fixed on a single screen. This model is broken apart by the
foldingof the dark space of cinema into the white cube of the gallery.
Chrissie Iles, Into the Light
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The film or video installation of the 1960s and 1970s drew on the interests
of Minimalism to bring the work of art into the viewers space and to engage
the viewers body. In the process, the viewers become mobile bodies invited
to reflect on their perceptions of the space, to take different viewpoints, and to
take note of the architectural situation as well as the physical qualities of the
image. In other words, ideally, the projected image installation allows for the
kind of reflection on perception in real time that Robert Morris advocates in
The Present Tense of Space. Kate Mondloch has wr itten about this aspect
ofinstallation art. When one considers the body in these media installations,
the screen emerges quite clearly as a material object in the installation space
that sets off another array of experiential factors that must be acknowledged.
She describes screens as a mbivalent objects both material objects in t he
viewers space a nd vir tual windows t hrough w hich t he vie wer lo oks. This
focus on screens allows her to describe various modes of viewing structured
by the inclusion of these objects in art contexts. These installations are designated screen-reliant because the screen is something with which the viewer
must interact.14
The presence of the moving image and screen surface also makes the experience o f time mo re co mplicated in film a nd video in stallations. Margaret
Morse has argued that video installation is both an art of presentation (installation) and an art of representation (photography, video, and film). Unlike
the tradi tional film, in a n in stallation t hat inc ludes mo ving imag e media,
there is no c lear separation between the viewer and the material on display.
In the works discussed in this chapter, the film projector is often also a significant object in the installation. In the installation format, the viewer is able
to move through the space and to examine the image in a way not permitted
in these other formats. Several rhythms of time a re experienced at once in
film installations, including the pace of bodily experience, the movement of
film through the projector, and the time of the film story.
The installations that are discussed in this chapter are all interior spaces
rooms. The L atin w ord f or r oom is camera. The o riginal ca mera obs cura,
developed in the Middle Ages, would have been a room in which a hole was
made in a wall in o rder to let light from outside be cast inside. A screen or
sheet could be hung to intercept the light, and on that sheet, a p erfect but
reversed and upside-down image would be projected.15 The technology was
soon used both as a kind of entertainment as well as a scientific instrument,
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to view solar eclipses safely. Of course, camera obscuras are the basis for the
modern camera. This is a minor connection between the origins of photography and the development of room-sized, film-installation exhibition spaces,
but it is interesting to ponder. The contrast with the cinema space in these old
camera obscuras is significant. Where traditional movie theaters have viewers s eated, t hese camera obs curas would have allowed t he vie wer to move
around. And interestingly, these camera obscura spaces and installation art
spaces represent more closely the setting of early cinema exhibitions where
the film projector itself was an object of fascination for the viewer.16 Before
1907, vie wers b ehaved mo re lik e t hey w ere in a space o f leisur e, walkin g
inand out, talking loudly because the films were mostly silent and the length
of the projection was very short.
The image is made material and physically present in these modern installation works. One of the works that represented a breakthrough in the phenomenological or sculptural presentation of the projected image was Anthony
McCalls Line Describing a Cone.17 In this very simple 1973 film, McCall made
the beam of projected light from the projector the focus of the viewers attention because it occupied a volume in space. Made by filming and playing back
in slowed-down time a cir cle b eing drawn on a sur face, t he cone emerges
from a line of light over the course of half an hour. As this process unfolded,
viewers could walk t hrough the space, walk t hrough the cone, and observe
the projector as it cast the light. Time, the viewers body, and perception are
brought to bear in this work. [The gallery] is rather the ground over which
the temporalized space of the installation breaks.18 In this situation, the image
takes on a materiality and a presence in time and space that does not happen
in cinema.
Make Your Camera the Family Historian! Matthew Buckinghams

Situation Leading to a Story
Matthew Buckingham was born in 1963 in Iowa and graduated from the Art
Institute of Chicago. He received an mf a from Bard College and also went
onto attend the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has f ocused on
film and photography throughout his career, and he shares the same fascination with memory and history as the other artists discussed in this chapter. For instance, in Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes (2001),
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Buckingham us ed a p hotograph o f a n eq uestrian mo nument t o a b ishop

named Absalon (Absalon participated in the Crusades and used his plunder
to co mmission a hist ory o f D enmark). The title of t he w ork des cribes t he
piece accurately. The slide is t o be projected until the film fades co mpletely
due to exposure from the heat of the slide projector.19 Although the project
comments on the ethics of commemorating historical figures such as Absalon as heroes, it also speaks to the fragility of photographic media. The work
is again a type of process art into which decay becomes part of the structure
of the work.
In 1999, Buckingham produced the film installation Situation Leading to a
Story, in which he walks viewers through the process of gleaning a history from
material fragments. In this case, the fragments consist of four 16 mm home
movies that the narrator discovered discarded on a street in New York. Each
has a different subject matter: a garden party in the 1920s, the renovation of a
car garage in the 1930s, a bullfight, and a film that documents the building of a
tramway in the Andes. The story comes out of the authors attempt to connect
the films to each other and to their origin. In the course of narrating the films,
Buckingham outlines the possible circumstances in which they were made by
telling the story of the marketing and sale of Kodak home movie cameras.
The story begins at the end of the films lives. One e vening, Buckingham
was walking on Eighth Street in New York City after watching a film at the
Independent Film Center. He noticed a small box labeled Best and Company,
a now-defunct department store, lying on a sidewalk next to some trash. The
box contained four reels of 16 mm film nestled in labeled canisters. When the
artist opened the film cans, he noticed that the films were brittle and had a
strange odor, which is indicative of vinegar syndrome. Acetate film breaks
down over time, releasing acetic acids, which cause the plastic and emulsion
to erode. The reaction produces a vinegar smell. Because of the films condition, Buckingham decided to transfer the images to a new film.
The new film stocks were then spliced together. The sequence begins with a
film labeled Garden. It shows a white, middle-class family dressed in the style
of the 1920s a t home on a summer da y in a co untry house. The men w ear
jackets and hats and shoot arrows at targets or play golf. The women swing on
garden swings or walk through the garden smoking cigarettes.
A little girl watches her older relatives shoot arrows. In one sequence, the
camera operator films birds leaving a nest in the eaves of the house. The sec-
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F I G U R E 4 . 3 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999, Film still. Film

installation. Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.
ond film shows the building of a ca ble car network in t he Peruvian Andes.
There a re st unning shots of t he mountains as c louds roll by t hem. White
people make surveys while Peruvian locals pull on long cables or train horses
and mules. Horses are shown carrying the materials of the tramway up the
mountain. The t hird film shows t he ex cavation o f t he ya rd at t he co untry
house and the building of a four-car garage. The final film shows a bullfight
in Mexico in which the camera is turned on and off while the matador and
bull sweep around the ring in the setting sun.
In the midst o f describing one film, the narrator says, I only remember
certain words from the French I learned in school. One of those is maintenant
or now, which derives from the Latin words for hand and held to hold in
the hand. I wondered who held the camera in the present tense, recording the
moment. F or t he ca mera o perator, t he filming is her e a nd no w. F or t he
viewer, t he film represents paradoxically t he there and t hen in t he here
and now. It is in the process of trying to discover that unknown operator that
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Buckingham b egins t o r ead o ne film aga inst t he o ther to b rush hist ory
against the grain, to use Walter Benjamins phrase.20 In Buckinghams film
installation we find ourselves at the end of a chain of events, in which these
once-innovative forms of material memory have become ruins. To understand why film and other old media became part of the content of installation
art in the last fifteen years, it is important to understand how we have come
to think about memory in the twentieth century.
Consumers of the Latest Memory-Making Technology in 1923

It was an exciting possibility to make ones own moving pictures and to display them at home in the early twentieth century, but the technology had to
be worked out first. Kodak wanted to exploit a new market of home moviemakers, but the first step to doing this involved producing a film base that
was not as likely to burst into flame as the highly inflammable nitrocellulose
film used by professionals. At the beginning of the century, Kodak began work
on an acetate-based 35 mm safety film. By 1909, t hey had found a us able
formula that involved combining cellulose with acetic hydride, which would
slow the burning of the film. 21 George Eastman insisted the CinKodak Model
A camera use only the new safety film. The first Model A was p roduced in
1920, and it was finally marketed to the public in 1923 with an advertisement
in the New York Tribune.22 The Kodak Company sold the cameras and film as
part of a complete home movie production kit, including screen and splicer,
for $325, which is only slightly less than a Ford car cost at the time.
Like the family slide show later in the twentieth century, the home movie
was a ne w memory ritual that would bring the family together around the
home movie screen. According to Mary Ann Doane, while still photographs
could render a mo ment into a visual ob ject, film was a ble to preserve the
experience of duration in time i tself. What was registered on film was lif e
itself in all i ts multiplicity, diversity and contingency.23 People wanted this
marvelous technology to preserve their familys special events. Buckingham
notes in his commentary that within a few years over five hundred thousand
movie-making kits had been sold. In researching the production codes found
on the edges of the film he finds, Buckingham discovers that each of the film
stocks was made in the early 1920s and early 1930s. We can assume then that
the family that produced the films was able to afford a home movie camera as
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soon as it came out and to use it to record the banal moments of a summer
afternoon and an overseas vacation.
The fact that the family who made these films owned a home movie camera in t he 1920s indica tes both how wealthy they were and that they used
their wealth to buy the latest technology. To buy such products marks the
consumer as up to date and sophisticated. The theorist Jean Baudrillard observed that there is a n obligation for consumers to buy the newest and the
latest.24 Having the knowledge and power to buy the most innovative products is the means by which consumers differentiate themselves from others.
The middle-class man who was able to buy the latest movie equipment distinguished himself from his less technology-sophisticated peers and was rewarded both with a s ense of individual superiority and with the novel and
liberating effects of the new technology.
The result of such enthusiasm, based on a desire to preserve memories and
to distinguish oneself socially, had predictable results: an ever-growing cache
of recordings, films, and images made by amateurs. As I have noted earlier,
cultural observers commented on the accumulating pile of photographic records in t he twentieth century, w hich burst t he dams of memory and rendered mnemonic technology useless for the individual. Memories were soon
relegated to various kinds of archives, administered by institutions, or left to
rot in attics and basements. The transfer of memory to machines represents
simply another example of new media technology.
Memory had b ecome a kind o f problem in t he early twentieth century,
and this understanding is reflected in the way it is described by writers. For
Walter B enjamin, t he ne w t echnology o f p hotography a nd esp ecially film
had transformed memory and experience. He discerned a duality of memory,
which turns on the relationship of technology to the body. The first type of
memory is rooted in the body and based on perception. It is woven out of the
threads of sensuous experience. The second type of memory corresponds to
the photograph and other forms of recording media, such as film. This duality is als o reflected in t he two kinds o f installation, the bodily/experiential
and the archival, that this book has been discussing.
Bodily memo ry, f or B enjamin, is ex emplified b y M arcel P rousts ico nic
scene o f t he t asting o f t he madeleine co okie in his b ook Remembrance of
Thing s Past.25 Proust, after trying and failing to recall his childhood, takes a
bite of the sweet cookie and immediately relives a moment from his childhood
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when he a te these treats while drinking tea at his a unts house. This happy
moment returned to him wi th all t he complexity of a li ve experience, engaging his senses and imagination. Bodily memory is a fleeting sensation of
wholeness and pleasure in what is Prousts otherwise dull exercise in recollection. Bodily memory is a cluster of associations that cling to a perception. In
bodily memory, one becomes aware of the network of memories and sensations that are tied to this perception. It is an experience of memory that declines as t he function of remembering is t aken over by photography, sound
recording, and film, according to Benjamin. The transformation of memory
is emblematic of the transformation of experience in the modern world. Genuine experience according to Benjamin can now only be evoked distantly via
art in poetic correspondences, which are the fusion of sound, sight, smell,
and touch possible through art. The type of memory that Benjamin associates with correspondences is ep hemeral. Poetry is o ne way of achieving
this fusion, but perhaps Benjamin would have seen installation art as another
means.
To contrast bodily and archival memory, Benjamin refers to Prousts dissatisfaction with his attempts to recall his experience of Venice. He describes
the retrieved memories as a collection of photographs. Photography records
all of the visual inf ormation of a past mo ment without any other sensuous
data, thus freezing and isolating it. The takeover of the practice of memory
by photography and film, for those early twentieth-century critics, is a symptom of the decline of genuine experience in modernity. Photography in Benjamins argument is symptomatic of mechanization, the one-touch action of
the modern world, and of the growing anonymity of the masses. All o f the
social and cultural relationships and experiences symbolized by the experience of bodily memory dissolve as t he more anonymous realm of archival
and photographic memory expands. However, photography also distances
us from the past in a way that we can question it. It also serves as a foil to the
powerful effects of ritual, which Benjamin sees as a me ans of unthinkingly
holding in place certain beliefs, customs, and rules.
In Buckinghams film installation, Situation Leading to a Story (1999), he
notes that the Kodak moving picture manual urged its readers to understand
that your movie camera exists to preserve life not to destroy it. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the anxiety and excitement generated by industrialization was exemplified by the response to the possibilities
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of photographic technology.26 Photography was seen as something that preserves but also destroys. In the photographic portrait, the individual, already
absent, is r educed to the parameters of a spa tial situation. In an old snapshot, it is not the actual individuality of the person depicted but the clothing
and jewelry the sitter wears, the conventional and socially determined posing, and the spatialization of a moment of time. The photographic portrait
isonly an array of things. In photography, as we have discussed in reference
to the documentation of installation art, an experience that includes all of the
senses is reduced to a visual document bounded by a frame. It is an evocation
of death.
The transfer of memory and experience to material records has had a profound impact on our c ulture. If hist ory is co nceived as ma terial residues,
thesocial relationships that form history are hidden within the concrete we
walk on, the clothes we wear, and the books and stories we read. Thes e objects do not appear as historical evidence of social relationships because we
have forgotten their true origin as t he work of other people. Whether from
the madeleine cookie or the old arcades, the fragments of text from the past
reveal in their materiality these barely remembered social relationships. The
decline of bodily memory represents a loss of a certain kind of access to the
past t hat requires work to recover. Film a nd photography, t herefore, were
the new technologies that spelled the end o f certain ways of experiencing
and remembering.
The person who encounters a film, the Buckingham work suggests, must
go through the effort to redeem this material for history. As Mary Ann Doane
notes, film records e vents indis criminately and t herefore r isks opacity and
meaninglessness by gathering a heap of useless historical details.27 The films
Buckingham finds seem to have this quality of randomness. The narrator of
Situation Leading to a Story explains the efforts that he made to put these film
fragments together and to render them meaningful, historical materials. The
effort involves not only the preservation of the film and the research about its
production but also the search for the places and individuals connected to it.
The films must be placed in their original context to be meaningful a context that involves a web of social, economic, and material relationships.
To that end, Buckingham visits an address in upstate New York in Ossining
near the legendary Sleepy Hollow. In the process, he encounters various forms
of history, b oth its revival and its erasure. He meets a mis erable historical
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F I G U R E 4 . 4 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999, Film still. Film

installation. Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.
reenactor employed at the author Washington Irvings home. And he discovers t hat t he t own o f O ssining, New York, c hanged i ts na me f rom S ing
Sing, which derives from the Native American name for the place, in order to
distance itself from Sing Sing Prison.
Buckingham goes deeper into the background of the intriguing film titled
Peru. The narrator is able to analyze these films in such a way that, through
them, we see the relationships among individuals in the past. 28 He tells the
story of t he C erro de P asco C ompany in P eru, w hich was o rganized by a
group of wealthy New York business people in 1901, a round the time t hat
the Kodak Company was conducting research on safety film. The y bought
up ba nkrupt co pper-mining co mpanies in P eru a nd p roduced a p owerful
American-run business. The film shows the company and its local employees
building a tramway through the Andes in the 1920s. The film could have been
used to promote the company in s ome capacity. The harsh working conditions at the mine, we learn, inspired the organization of labor unions, and the
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company poisoned the land and water around the mine and then profited by
buying it up for reduced prices. We follow the story of this company up until
the 1970s w hen i t b ecomes na tionalized b y a ne w r evolutionary Peruvian
government. Buckinghams narrative does the work of uncovering these social relationships embedded in the film. He never connects it directly, but the
narrators research again raises the question of whether this too is the source
of the happy familys wealth in Garden.
Because he ca nt find dir ect hist orical co nnections, B uckingham finally
wants to track down someone who would remember the connection among
the films. In the end, he searches in the Manhattan phone book for Harrison
Dennis, whose name he found on the films, and, much to his surprise, finds
him. The narrator wants to describe the films to Dennis, to jog his memory.
But when he gets on the phone with him, the man hurriedly states he doesnt
remember the films, then becomes annoyed, and hangs up the phone. The
only t hing t hat co nnects t hese films f or cer tain, finally, i s th at th ey w ere
thrown away. Someone wanted to forget them and perhaps the memories that
connect t hem. D espite t he effort to recover t his history, t he p erson w hose
memories would connect to this history refuses to own them.
Buckinghams story, full of fits and starts, remembering and forgetting, and
discoveries and disappearances, demonstrates one way of trying to uncover
the s ocial and c ultural relationships embedded in e very artifact of history.
The unresolved quality of the story suggests that it is far more diffic ult to knit
a story together out of fragments than one would expect. At one point, he
says, Narrative is a chain of events in a cause and effect relationship occurring in time a nd space. The plot of an event is selected from the events of a
story. The home movies, he says, do not constitute a narrative, and in a certain s ense, t he na rrators st ory is fa r t oo f ragmentary t o mak e o ne ei ther.
Therefore, the films have become mute materials, subject to decay as much
asany other kind of historical artifact. These materials, used to preserve individual memory, have enabled that memory to be disavowed and forgotten.
The transfer of the task of recording memory and exp erience to machines
and materials represents a kind o f forgetting. The theorist Theo dor Adorno
explains his co ncerns about the effects of industrial production, mass p roduction, or reification on society to Walter Benjamin in a 1940 letter in these
terms: For all r eification is a f orgetting: objects become purely thing-like
the moment they are retained for us without the continued presence of their
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other aspects: when something of them has b een forgotten. This raises the
question as to how far this forgetting is one that is capable of shaping experience, which I would almost call epic forgetting, and how far it is a reflex forgetting.29 If the evidence of history is found in the materials and objects we
use everyday, the technique of machine production allows this evidence to
be forgotten. And what we learn, ironically, from Buckinghams work, is that
the materials and practices of new photographic technologies, which once
threatened the disappearance of traditional forms of memory, must now be
rescued and preserved.
Pierre Nora, a French historian, wrote the article Between Memory and
History: Les Lieux de Mmoire in 1989, and his assessment of the challenge
of archival memory seems to ring true for an earlier moment in the century.
Noras memory is o ne of ritual and tradition that is no w mostly gone. The
little that is left remains under pressure from archival memory. Natural, collective memory has b een pressed into and maintained in a reas and objects
Nora describes as lieux de mmoire. The conclusions of Buckinghams work
contradict those of Pierre Nora. He claims that memory is endangered, pointing to the recent scramble in academia a nd the broader culture to examine
memory in all its forms. And it is in danger from archival memory. But archival memory too is in da nger of disappearing and requires preservation and
redemption. Buckingham and Deans filmic archives and films for archives
suggest t hat film, r ecording m aterials, a nd s till p hotographs, ra ther th an
threats to memory, have become endangered evocative objects.
Outmoded Media as Evocative Objects

That film has b ecome an evocative object is sug gested by the installation
arrangement of Buckinghams work. The installation of Situation Leading to a
Story had a distinc tive setup that Buckingham designed in order to encourage viewers to focus on the outmoded, material qualities of the film technology. The film projection and the film projector were placed in two different
rooms. In the 2009 exhibition of the piece at the Museum of Contemporary
Art in D enver, the artist used an Eiki Slim Line projector with the film reel
held o n a ho rizontal p latform a bove t he p rojector wi th tw o flywheels extended in either direction. In this arrangement, it was possible to watch the
8mm film as it threaded its way from film reel through projector. The viewer
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could examine the individual frames of film as they passed. The very fascination of the film projector as an object, as in Deans work, suggests that it is no
longer an everyday piece of equipment but has become an artifact of history.
The arrangement of the installation is significant because it frames the different encounters with the film apparatus differently: sound, equipment, and
image each have their own space. Buckingham explained that he a rranged
the components of the piece so that one would hear the audio on the film
first, then encounter the film projector as it ran, and finally turn a corner and
see the projected image. In the installation, a small window was cut close to
the bottom of the wall t hrough which the projector cast i ts relatively small
projection. When viewers walked down a short hallway and entered the projection r oom, th ey saw th at th e film was p rojected in t he fa rthest b ottom
corner of the room. The artist explained that he wanted people to enter the
room in a line, stack up to watch the film, and then follow the same path out.
In the exhibition in Denver, the speakers were not outside the room but inside and facing toward the projection. In this arrangement, viewers seemed
to be reluctant to move past the speakers. Instead, they watched the film projection from a distance, as if the space was truly a private space in which only
certain people were allowed to watch the films like a home movie. Nevertheless, Buckingham is always amused that when people are comfortable they
want to stand in the light of the projector in Situation and to cast shadows on
the film projection.
Sound too is k ey to these works. As Tacita Dean remarked, When I p ut
the sound of a dog ba rking or a mo torbike passing at dusk, I a m so aware
of the f eeling o f a bandonment t hat i t ca n cr eate. Its incr edibly p owerful,
sound.30 The s ounds in t he installation reveal t he difference b etween t he
digital present and the recent past w hen film was an ordinary event. It isnt
possible to observe as well how a digital projector works, and although there
is always the roar of the fan in a digital projector, the distinctive click, click,
click of the film sprockets is absent. In writing about an exhibition of Tacita
Deans work, James Quandt quotes her as s aying, Analog, it seems, is a description of all the things I hold dear.31 As explanation of this, Quandt goes
on to say that digital imagery is insubstantial, endlessly transmutable, there
but not there. In Tacita Deans work and in Buckinghams, the sound of the
projector and its fan is audible in the projection room reminding viewers of
the material presence of the media.
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F I G U R E 4 . 5 M atthew Buckingham, Situation Leading to a Story, 1999. Installation view at

PS1. Film installation. Matthew Buckingham. Courtesy of the Murray Guy Gallery.
Sound is also a key component in many of Rene Greens works. If Greens

works seem to embody a photographic archive, they also comprise a sound
recording archive. Greens installations and films are studded with various
sound experiences. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts addressed the intersection
of personal memory and history in the 1970s via music. She shot a video to
accompany the installation. It opens with sequences of found footage, a fairground carousel, Greens Super 8 film footage of Cleveland, video c lips of
protesters in B erlin in t he 1960s, a nd scenes from a 1970 M ick Jagger film.
These sho ts a re in terspersed wi th imag es o f r ecord alb um co vers a nd t he
sounds of music of the period.
The section of the installation Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts titled Simulated Vinyl Diary included a set of record albums from the 1970s, a turntable,
and he adphones The a rrangement in vited vie wers t o r elax a nd en joy t he
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music of the 1970s while coming up with their own memories and associations with the time. The title of this section suggests that this music forms
the s oundtracks a nd memo ries o f millio ns o f li ves. This p roduces a s ense
ofidentification among viewers that has implications for understanding the
formation of identity in the last few decades.
The most str iking example of this in Greens video Partially Buried is the
several-minutes-long sequence of music by Jimi Hendrix and Buddy Miles
that accompanies a shot of a person looking through albums. The film then
cuts to images of the hill w here students were shot at Kent State University
in1970. The music represents the collective idealism of the 1970s, for which
many are nostalgic, while the images recall the extinguishing of those collective hopes. The sequence represents the tension inherent in B enjamins notion of the wish image. In Greens video and installation, the enjoyment of
pop music is connected to mass protest and political revolution and its aftermath in the 1970s. Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts stages the tension between
individual memory and collective history, as well as the nostalgia evoked by
the material qualities of mass-produced objects in the twentieth century. The
film is also full of sounds typical of the 1970s. The tick and whir of film moving t hrough a p rojector acco mpanies G reens S uper 8 f ootage o f t he K ent
State University campus. The distinctive sound of a record needle dropping
into a vin yl gr oove i s h eard acco mpanied b y p ops o f s tatic a s th e n eedle
moves across the surface of an album. The inclusion of such characteristic
sounds in the video emphasizes the material and sensory encounter with objects produced and used at an earlier period of time. The sounds embody and
evoke for many the sense of idealism of that time.
The madeleine of t he twenty-first century may b e t he s ound of a needle
dropping on a record or film ticking through a projector. The connection that
we have to these mass-produced objects through our bodies points to the fact
that w e w ere tra ined t o us e t hem in a co nsumer c ulture t hat no w deem s
them obsolete. These mass-produced consumer products shaped daily habits, s ocial p ractices, a nd finally t he memo ries o f co untless indi viduals. A s
wehave seen in Deans film Kodak and in Buckinghams Situation Leading to
a Story, it is in t he passing of cer tain media t hat t hey b ecome interesting
again strange but hauntingly familiar. This turn toward the past has inspired some observers to suggest that nostalgia may now be a f orm of critique in art.32
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Buckinghams films are silent but narrated with the story of their recovery,
that is, t he artists efforts to research their origins and his failure to knit together this history. In the process of listening to this, the viewer realizes that
Buckingham reads one film against the next opening up possibilities for
historical coincidence and connection, drawing together places such as upstate New York and the Andes, a nd emphasizing these materials origins in
specific times and places. In this way, Situation Leading to a Story shares qualities with Rene Greens video piece Partially Buried Continued as well.
History and Memory as Sensory Experiences

Thirty years after McCall made Line Describing a Co ne, he was in a r oundtable discussion with Matthew Buckingham on the occasion of Chrissie Iless
exhibition of projected image art at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
At one p oint in t he dis cussion, McCall noted t hat most o f t he artists w ho
worked with film in the 1960s were completely self-taught, having come out
of backgrounds in sculpture and painting. And we approached it as material,
much like one would approach the use of any sculptural material.33 Buckingham responds to this by saying how his generation of artists was educated in
the history and theory of film. For him, this education and background led
him to read in history and in other fields that related to documentary film. It
is clear that the generation of conceptual artists and their interest in the materiality of film had an impact on Buckinghams work. But Buckinghams film
installations, like Deans, highlight the materiality of film not simply as a medium but also as a historical object. His work appeals to the viewers sense of
smell, touch, and hearing, as much as to the sense of sight. While he engages
the viewers senses with his work, Buckingham hopes also to get viewers to
reflect with him on the process of constructing a narrative history from material remains.
As I noted earlier, the projected image installation brings together present
and past. The video installation, Margaret Morse argues, is the strange combination of the here and now of the viewers body with the there and then of
the photographic image. It is in t he examination of the break b etween the
two that the viewer begins to ask questions about memory and the way experience has b een shaped by photographic media. It also turns the viewers
focus from the image alone to the entire moving image apparatus (projector,
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image, sound, and the space in which it is shown). The object that had been
considered two dimensional and visual, the photograph, becomes three dimensional and haptic, t actile, aural, and e ven olfactory in t he installation
context. In Dean and Buckinghams works, this examination sparked by a
bodily exp erience ra ises q uestions a bout obs olescence in t echnology a nd
how obsolescence shapes the perception of history. These installations make
historical objects physically present, as Hal Foster says.
The philosopher F. R. Ankersmit argues that in nostalgia the past and present are experienced in t he same moment and in t he same space. Nostalgic
historical experience is the individual sensuous experience of the past in the
present. Ankersmit calls t his a sublime experience of the past: Historical
experience pulls the faces of past and present together in a short but ecstatic
kiss. Historical exp erience is, in t his way, a surface phenomenon: It t akes
place on the surface or interface where the historian and the past meet each
other.34
The encounter of t he past in t he meeting of sur faces sug gests t hat t he
sense of touch, smell, and sound are more important than sight. When one
experiences the past in this way, one undergoes the same sensations experienced some time in the distant past. History as surface in Ankersmits reading does not render the past a shallow, hollow phenomenon but instead represents physical contact with the past that overcomes the gap between subject
and object, history and the present, through bodily memory. Experience takes
place in t he contact b etween the surfaces of things. It is t he aural, tactile,
olfactory, and even visual contact with outmoded objects that provokes the
sense of nostalgia. It is the intensity and emotional tinge of the experience
ofnostalgia that intrigues Ankersmit. He even argues that nostalgia provides
the most authentic experience of the past.
Nostalgia is at the same time a p owerful experience that is e asily used to
manipulate for the purpose of selling products, to create false allegiances, or
to soothe prematurely worries about present conditions. And it is startling
to realize t hat ma ny co llective exp eriences of nost algia in t he last pa rt of
thetwentieth century are inspired and organized around the consumption
ofmass-produced consumer goods. In the era of mass production and mass
media, millions of individuals are likely to have used objects, such as cassette
tapes, home movie cameras, and vinyl l ps, in the same way at the same time.
Our bodies and senses have been shaped by the collective engagement and
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use of mass-produced objects. Nostalgia is a s ensuous exp erience, I a rgue,

following Ankersmit, that involves the body of the viewer who uses the massproduced objects that Adorno disdained as vehicles of forgetting. Activities
such as p utting he adphones on ones he ad, he aring film pass t hrough t he
sprockets of a projector, and smelling slide film heat up as it is warmed by
abulb become ways of reflecting on the passage of time.
All of t hese s ensations are produced by t he material qualities of objects
that have b een mass p roduced. M illions o f p eople have exp erienced t hese
sensations when using these objects. It is because of this that, when encountering these objects and materials once they become outmoded, we tend to
respond with a pleasant and surprising feeling of recognition a recognition
that can even span differences among cultures and classes in contemporary
society. This nostalgia reveals something about the viewers relationship to
the past and to other individuals.
The installations described in t his chapter, including Buckinghams function as f rames f or e vocative ob jects, or heterotopiaas I dis cussed in t he
introductionspaces in w hich disparate places and times in tersect via t he
objects and materials they contain. Michel Foucault names, as exa mples of
heterotopia, museums, a rchives, a nd lib raries w here time acc umulates, a
phenomenon that he a rgues is uniq ue to modernity.35 But he als o includes
the movie theater, which encapsulates both different places and times in the
form of film. By producing an intersection of times a nd places using these
outmoded forms of media, these installations reveal that photographic media,
which Benjamin had des cribed as a f oil to bodily memory, can, when they
become outmoded, engage viewers senses and bodies and become experiential mnemonic devices. Analog film and photography now evoke bodily
memories.
Media Nostalgia in Contemporary Art

There have been many examples of artists using media as a device for memory and nostalgia in recent exhibitions. In 2005, the Guggenheim Museum in
New York acquired Slater Bradleys Doppelganger Trilogy (20012004), which
was a sentimental and nostalgic piece about the artists childhood heroes. The
video installation took several rooms and focused on the artists fascination
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with 1980s pop stars. Each of the videos imitated the various media in which
the pop stars were originally filmed from Super 8 film to the grainy videotape of portable, handheld cameras in the 1990s. Another exhibition the same
year at the Baltimore Museum of Art focused on slide p rojectors and slide
shows in a rt practice. The exhibition presented works produced in t he last
part of the twentieth century, from Dan Grahams Homes for America (1966
1967) to a recent work by Peter Fischli and David Weiss using slides of flowers and mushrooms displayed by timed projectors.
The 2006 Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial provided examples
of media nostalgia as well. Many of the selections for the year included film
installations in which the projector was placed in the installation space. Examples include Diana Thater and T. Kelly Masons Jump (2004), w hich featured two happy things from Thaters childhood: the Bob Dylan song Subterranean H omesick B lues a nd j ump r oping. The w ork inc luded a film
projector, colorful bulletin boards, and recorded music. The same edition of
the Whitney featured Rodney Grahams Torqued Chandelier Release (2005),
a sin gle-room film in stallation t hat disp layed a n ela borate film projector
projecting a nearly still image of a crystal chandelier.36
As these exhibitions were taking place, as I ha ve noted, Kodak and other
companies were eliminating t he production of analog film. The us e of old
film a nd slide p rojectors, vintage video, a nd other o ld recording media in
works of art highlight the shift from the analog to digital media. Thes e machines, t apes, vin yl r ecords, a nd films ha ve b ecome f ragments a nd r uins
pointing to a ne wly estranged past. The transition to digital media in t he
2000s seems to parallel the point in the early twentieth century when Walter
Benjamin observed photography and film to have marked a decisi ve break
with the older cultural forms of painting and the graphic arts. Thes e analog
media have colonized our unconscious, been objects of desire, and shaped
our exp eriences. This ne w p erspective b ecomes a pparent in t hese in stallations that deliberately frame the material qualities of these media. We see
inthe late twentieth century that the viewers encounter with these objects is
more like Benjamins bodily memory, which photography and film was supposed to destroy. Therefore, perhaps digital media has b ecome a new foil to
these outmoded objects and materials, as p hotography had b een for traditional forms of memory.
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Tony Cokess Headphones

How do we regard nostalgia and old media in the period of transition to digital a nd do wnloadable media? T ony C okess video in stallation ti tled Headphones from 2004 demo nstrates the way nostalgia in t he 2000s ill uminates
this transition most clearly. His videos focus on the culture of pop music, and
they often co mbine recorded music and textual elements. Cokes was b orn
in1959 and received an mf a degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. He also attended the Whitney Independent Study Program in the 1980s.
Cokes has w orked for two decades in video a rt and is w ell known for t he
video work of X-pr z in the 1990s.
The video p iece titled Headphones represents Cokess interest in t he way
technologies have organized groups a nd s ocial identities. It combines p op
music and vintage marketing films by the music recording industry, which in
the context of his video, should enlist the affective power of nostalgia kindled
by these pop culture artifacts. However, the material qualities of the media he
uses seem to be downplayed in this piece. Hence, if nostalgia is a sublime and
tactile experience of the past, Cokess work seeks to thin that experience or,
perhaps, to filter it in order to encourage the viewer to reflect on the past and
its relationship to the present. Cokes uses digital video and processors to create a sense of distance between the viewer and the powerful elements of the
outmoded media in his work. The piece uses archival r c a Company promotional films and text by music theorist Jacques Attali in a la yered structure.
Although the vintage films inspire nostalgia in the viewer, the video frames
that nostalgia in a particular way.
Cokes uses nostalgia to examine the way group identity is f ormed in t he
context of consumer culture and how such identities have shifted o ver the
decades in t he twentieth century. In nostalgia, one can perceive collective
identity produced by consumer technologies that was obscured by the isolating effect of using the technologies at the time. Via the visual structure of his
video, Cokes uses this awareness to invite viewers to think about the isolating
effect of current technologies and the possibility of collective hopes, the wish
image that they now obscure.
As the scratched, crackling film begins in Headphones we are invited into
the home of an American family of the 1950s, j ust sitting down to listen to
the latest in audio technology.
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FIGURE
4 . 6 Tony Cokes, Headphones, 2004, video still. Image: Scott Pagano for Tony Cokes
2005. Courtesy of the artist.
They are white, middle class, and beaming with excitement. Father, mother,
and daughter sit in a sleek and modern living room. As dad gives a large cassette t o his y oung da ughter t o p lay o n t he t ape p layer, t he m usic sw ells
andthe narrator gushes over the simplicity of the new recording technology.
The film, dating f rom t he late 1950s, is a p romotional piece made b y t he
production co mpany J am H andy f or t he r c a C ompanys t hen inno vative
audio-recording cartridge, and it presents this scene of idealized white and
middle-class normality as if it were made possible by consuming the latest in
electronic products. As with most c ultural artifacts intended to exhibit the
latest in t echnology, the vintage film is no w strongly marked as o utmoded
and naive.
The advertisement for r c a s cassette-recording device that begins Cokess
video seems most archaic because it suggests that a family would sit down
inthe living room together to enjoy a piece of recorded music. Thi s archaic
social p ractice p oints t o C okess r eal sub ject ma tter the s ocial effect of
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recorded music. Recording has tra nsformed music from a co llectively enjoyed, p erformance-based medi um t o a medi um t hat millio ns o f is olated
individuals wi th he adphones co nsume. The video em phasizes t hat t his is
made possible by mechanical, electrical, and now digital reproduction.
Nostalgia is usually considered an individual experience, which might be
the reason to discount it as a means to access collective historical experience.
However, nost algia r eveals t he co nnections b etween indi viduals t hat had
been possible in the context of mass media and mass culture in the twentieth
century. It does so in at least two ways. First, nostalgic experience shows us
that we have been organized into groups with common interests by the products we consumed. Nostalgia is a means of consolidating an individual sense
of self.37 However, one of the characteristics that Elizabeth E. G uffey notes
about the consumption of outmoded objects is t hat subcultures often f orm
around these products. When various consumers of such products were interviewed about their interest in o ld things ranging from those who buy
vintage clothes to those who frequent Irish pubs they continuously cited
social connection and identification as one of the primary pleasures of nostalgia. In the realm of consumer culture, nostalgia conjures a s ense of connection among p eople who watched the same t v shows, b ought the same
things, or listened to the same music. Having defined themselves through the
products they consume, consumers in turn identify with each other through
those same products when they are old. Thus, the product by which we distinguish ourselves from others when it is new becomes the product by which
we identify with others as we get old.
Second, it also directly involves individual bodies. Individuals had to learn
to use new technologies or to appreciate the latest music. It was necessary to
train ones hands and ears to enjoy vinyl records or to project films at home.
As Tony Cokes points out, many of the products for which we are now nostalgic were used to make certain strange, new activities, like watching home
movies or listening to music in your living room, normal and expected.38 The
intensity of the experience of nostalgia in consumer culture derives from the
bodily experiences and feelings produced in consuming these objects of mass
culture. The training and practice to use these objects has transformed them
into evocative objects.
In Cokess video, the father turning over his domain of the use and enjoyment of high-tech objects to a little girl is me ant to underline the simplicity
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of this piece of home-recording equipment. It also symbolizes the way the

paternalistic recording industry has given naive consumers the power to record their own music. The use of these consumer products reinforced social
stratification and division, even as they produced groups. As the first piece
of film ends, the title Headphones comes on screen with the words transcription of a transcription . . . copy of a copy. As an extension of this mythical
story of Promethean distribution, Cokes emphasizes that each film and piece
of music in his video ca n be found as a n individual downloadable copy on
the Internet available to millions, and the artist includes the digital file names
for each.
This introduction leads into another piece of archival r c a promotional
film by Jam Handy titled New Dimensions in Sound, which dates from the late
1950s and promoted the companys innovative stereophonic sound systems.
Both pieces of film come from a time in r c a s postwar history when it was
aggressively expanding its market in ho me musical equipment and recordings. In 1949, in response to Columbia Musics development of the 331/3 rpm
vinyl record, r c a came out with its own 45 rpm extended-playing vinyl record and followed it with a turntable that could play records of both speeds. In
1958, r c a developed the technology for stereophonic sound.39 As each new
technology was r eleased, t he corporation had t o build a ne w market for it
and teach consumers why it was better and how to use the new equipment.
In this twenty-minute monaural film, an affable hidden na rrator talks to
several middle-class white men, all played by the same actor. As each character looks almost exac tly alike, the film suggests that, even as consumer culture is olates indi viduals, it encourages a typ e of conformity. The narrator
interrogates e ach ma n, w ho is alo ne a nd list ening t o m usic in his li ving
room, about his obsession with high-fidelity, home-recording and playback
equipment. The last few minutes of the film, however, shows a flight over the
Grand Canyon that has no soundtrack. The producer intended the music for
this segment to be supplied by the projectionist on new r c a home stereophonic eq uipment. The flight o ver t he G rand C anyon a ims t o s educe t he
viewer with pleasant, new sound quality and images that, combined, suggest
freedom through new technology.
Cokes chose only these last few minutes to include in his video. In one version of the work, it was p rojected onto a s creen in a galler y on an averagesized wall at the scale of a large landscape painting. Projected at this size, the
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film of the Grand Canyon creates the illusion of flying along with the music,
soaring o ver t he r ock r idges a nd floating o ver t he r iver t housands o f f eet
below, moving freely through open air. The images, in fact, would have complemented the stereophonic sound, which unlike monaural sound, seems to
come to listeners in three dimensions. The film and sound would have generated a sublime sensation of moving through open air that consumers would
associate with r c a s new stereo technologies, encouraging consumers to associate them with transcendence and, perhaps, even the possibility of escape
from the pressures of modern, middle-class life. We see in this film clip a convincing example of a wish image, which expresses the hopes of freedom and
happiness through consumerism and technology.
Of course, the vinyl l p, the turntable, and the cassette tape have now become mostly obsolete dispatched to the realm of novelty as have analog
photography and film. After dominating the recording industry for several
decades, the vinyl l p was challenged by the introduction of compact discs in
the 1980s, and compact discs have now been challenged by the introduction
of mp3s and downloadable digital files. Although vinyl records have recently
experienced a r evival with sales increasing by double digits in t he last f ew
years,40 they seem now to be a connoisseurs object. Vinyl l ps are art objects
in the work of Christian Marclay and others. For instance, an exhibition of
work b y co ntemporary a rtists w ho us e r ecords o pened a t t he I nstitute o f
Contemporary Art in B oston in 2011. These are now evocative objects rich
enough in terms of cultural memory and nostalgia to inspire works of art.
The Complexity of Nostalgia

For viewers in t he twenty-first century, the r c a film is kitsch, nostalgia, or
perhaps in the context of Cokess video, what the design historian Elizabeth
Guffey calls retro. In the last half o f the twentieth century, as in t he nineteenth, there has been a preoccupation with preservation. But rather than the
great monuments of the past, the interest in preservation now extends as well
to the ephemeral aspects of popular culture and fashion. Old styles, like old
movies, return to satisfy the thirst for authenticity.41 This interest stepped up
in the 1970s. For, rather than blindly consuming whatever was newest on the
market, consumers in the 1970s and after demonstrated an awareness of the
quick turnovers of styles, commodities, and designs and reacted to it. Eliza-
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beth Guffey distinguishes pure nostalgia from what she calls retro, which
she designates as a fondness for the past that is tempered by self-awareness.
The word retro first appeared, according to Guffey, in t he context of the
most future-oriented program in t he 1960s: t he American space p rogram.
Itwas a word used in association with John Glenns dangerous space flight
inthe Mercury capsule in 1962 in w hich he had t o us e retro rockets to
slow the descent of his capsule to earth. The word retro entered common
speech in the early 1970s when cultural observers noted disillusionment with
modernisms f ocus o n futurism. I n r etro, t here is a n a wareness a nd s elfconsciousness about ones historical position in relation to outmoded styles
and objects.
If nostalgia represents for Guffey a self-aware consumption of retro products, for Fredric Jameson, nostalgia is symptomatic of a problem. Jamesons
description of nostalgia differs from Guffeys and from Ankersmits in that it
represents a failure of cultural memory and a giving in to the forces of consumerism. He was r esponding to the wave of nostalgia that swept through
American s ociety in t he 1970s a nd 1980s. I t was a time , in fac t, t hat s ociologist Fred Davis described as a nostalgia epidemic. He cited the revival of
fashions from the 1920s and 1930s, as well as popular nostalgic films such as
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Last Picture Show, Amarcord, Jules
and Jim, a nd t o s ome ext ent, Bonnie a nd Cl yde.42 I n t he 1970s, i t s eemed
every era of history was available for appropriation by the t v drama.
Fredric Jameson seemed to despair of the critical power of cultural memory at this time. He argued that films such as Something Wild and Blue Velvet
are not stories about people so much as t hey are allegorical narrative(s) in
which the 1950s meet the 1980s.43 In such films, the historical context of the
eras is str ipped and packaged into easily consumed stereotypes.44 Rich historical narrative was r educed to t he melo drama of stock figures signifying
different historical periods. The sense of time a nd history seemed to have
changed under the influence of the mass media.45 Mass media reduce memory t o a t hin sur face p henomenon.46 R ather t han responding t o authentic
historical conditions, the postmodernist work of art used recycled recording
materials of the past in a new antihistorical pastiche. And the postmodernist
form of art, par excellence, according to Jameson, was experimental video.47
Film, on the other hand, remains a medium that has the depth and richness
to continue to harbor cultural memory.
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For Jameson, video represents the evacuation of historical perspective. In

video, he argues, it is not possible to obtain a sense of distanced perspective
that is an inherent part of memory. Jameson designates this quality of video
total flow, where there is no pause or break left in the structure of video to
allow for reflection. Nostalgia is the reduction of complex cultural memory
to a thin, transient sign of history.
Critical Historical Perspective in Cokess Video

Tony C okess Headphones seems to respond to this criticism of the immediacy of video b y using t he flexibility of digital video t o create a f ormal and
critical distance in the viewers encounter with the 1950s film. The viewer is
distanced from the seductive material qualities of the old promotional films
by the videos layered structure. While viewers feel as if t hey are flying over
the Grand Canyon, recent music by the electropop band Static begins to play,
and text rolls across the screen emphasizing its two-dimensional materiality.
The projection surface becomes a sur face in t he viewers space. The music
too disrupts the film, as i t is slower than the film images suggest there is
no sw ell o f u plifting o rchestral m usic. I n C okess video , w e m ust lo ok a t
several la yers sim ultaneously, wa tching t he digi tized film imag es o f flight
over the Grand Canyon, listening to the contrasting soundtrack, and reading
the scrolling text. We experience the sublime landscape by looking through
and beyond words. The simple structure of layering presents a c hallenge to
the vie wer, as i t is im possible to pay attention to more t han one layer at a
time. In this way, Cokes sets us in a distanced position to view the rhetorical
tactics of the film, by rupturing its illusion of naturalistic, three-dimensional
space via the flattening stream of Attalis text, and asking us to read the image.
The text in Cokess video is based on Attalis 1985 book Noise: The Political
Economy of Music, and it reinforces the visual structure of the video. It argues
that music organizes sound in a ma nner similar to the way society is o rganized. In music, harmony is produced by the elimination of conflict. In society, conflict is eliminated by an organization of social hierarchies.
Marketing strategies emphasize the unique identity that one could obtain
by consuming the newest and latest. These technologies on display in Headphones, however, have become nostalgic markers that situate the present in
relation to the past. They dont absorb the viewer in an ecstatic sensory expe-
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rience of the past, as suggested by the idea of a sublime historical experience,

because the digital video flattens out the sensuous experience of the original
film. In turn, this distance frames the old advertising films as ironic. In viewing t hese o utmoded media t hrough filters p rovided b y C okes, t he vie wer
notes that the dream of collective transcendence that was promised to consumers by technologies was a dr eam. His us e of t hese bits of archival film
isironic. We see a wish imag e revealed as a n illusion, a fals e substitute for
adesire. The advertisements are clearly manipulations of peoples hopes. In
Cokess w ork, vie wers obs erve t heir own response t o t hese o ld media a nd
think about it. It is in the awareness of common identity produced by nostalgia t hat o ne ca n s ee t he ways t hat t echnologies o rganized a nd shaped t he
memories and identities of millions of people.
Analog Media
F. R. Ankersmits idea of historical experience is a multisensory one in which
the senses of touch, hearing, and smell are involved. This notion of historical
experience contradicts the idea that the development of archival or machineproduced memory permanently escapes the investment of libidinal energies
that B enjamin a nd others p erceived in t he outmoded objects of t heir day.
Ifthe camera replaces the storyteller, and the slide show replaces the village
festival, the early critics of technology believed, the practices of remembrance
would disappear. Both Fredric Jameson and Pierre Nora take this position.
But these critics fail to note that the new technologies of the twentieth century generated their own rituals and practices that, in t urn, developed new
sorts of collective identity and evocative objects. It is important to note that
these rituals, and memories are now generated and shaped by consumer culture and no longer solely by the social relationships among individuals.
However, rather than flattening and stripping the sensuous experience of
memory permanently, analog media in photography and sound have shaped
experience and memory in a way novel for the twentieth century. With outmoded, evocative objects, the experience of the past becomes a comparative
practice. The brief and overwhelming sensuous encounter with the past in
the form of an object, a sound, or smell is quickly followed by comparison of
the past to the present. In this way, as the works discussed in this chapter suggest, outmoded media can provide both an intense experience of the past as
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well as t he possibility for gaining a cr itical perspective on that past and the
present. For instance, the sense of collective identity observable in the nostalgic response to these objects is felt often only in retrospect. This says something important about t he effect of ne w media o n s ocial relationships and
can lead to reflection on the current situation.
The development of a critical perspective depends, however, on how these
old media are used in these works. If Jameson argued that video was too immediate and left little space for reflection, Cokess piece manages to use digital
video to encourage viewers to think about the relationship between the past
and the present. One thing seems to connect Cokess strategy to the way that
Benjamin described photography in the mid-1930s. The photograph ismaterialized memory that addresses vision and excluded other senses, thereby providing the distanced perspective to examine a moment of past time. In digital
media, we dont necessarily get the sound of film looping through a projector,
or the smell of film stock heating up, or the crackle of a n eedle falling on a
record. Certain material experiences of outmoded media disappear in digital
media. B oth p hotography and film in t heir time co nstituted t he flattening
and reduction of sensory and bodily memory, as does digital media in ours.
The Media Installation as Frame for Observing the Passage of Time

Eduardo Cadava provides a succinct image of how the photograph presented
the means to reread history. The materialization of memory and experience
in the form of recordings and mass-produced objects presents an opportunity. The stillness of the photograph, according to Cadava, is an advantage, as
it seizes and holds time. This moment of history, frozen, can be brushed to
reveal its constituents, the tensions that would otherwise remain hidden.
Photography names a process that, seizing and tearing an image from its
context, works to immobilize the flow of history. This is why, following the
exigency of the fragment or thesis, photography can be said to be another
name for the arrest that Benjamin identifies with the moment of revolution.
. . . This caesura whose force of immobilization not only gives way to the
appearance of an image but also intervenes in the linearity of history and
politics can be understood in relation to what we might call the photographs
Medusa effect. 48
CAMERA OBSCURA
Cadava later states that cutting the continuous flow of past to present and
freezing it in ob ject form enables the rereading and rewriting of history.
The f reezing o f time in p hotography is t he r eduction o f li ved a nd b odily
experience to a visual artifact a material object. It is this distanced view on
lived experience that makes it possible to rethink such experiences. Note how
Cadavas des cription resembles Henri B ergsons des cription of t he mo dern
scientific understanding of time as snapshots of lived experience.
However, Cadava and B enjamin draw a different conclusion about photography from Bergson. Where Bergson regards the reduction of experience
as negative, Benjamin sees it as opening up possibilities. Benjamin argues that
the uncertain nature of meaning, produced by the stilling of a moment in the
photograph, unsettles viewers until they are provided with a text. It is the
unsettled quality of the photograph and other recording media that enables
the rereading of these forms of materialized memory.
The photograph is a f ramed object separated from what surrounds it
that because of its structure, its stillness, allows viewers to reread history or
to look at history in a different way. In a pa rallel way, the installations discussed in this chapter act as frames that provide the opportunity to question
how memories and desires are shaped in the current centuries. The installations function as heterotopias, in Michel Foucaults terminology, as complex
sites in w hich disparate places and times intersect. One o f the things Foucault notes about heterotopias is that these sites are isolated spaces in society
linked to it by every point. According to Mary Ann Doane, the cinema engages many different temporalities: the mechanical rhythm of the apparatus,
the temporality of the film story, and the temporality of the viewers experience of the work.49 In the installation space o f the gallery in w orks such as
Buckinghams and Deans, viewers are asked to use their bodies and to engage
in a f uller sensory experience. In Cokess piece, the experience is enha nced
not by a n en gagement wi th t he vie wers b ody b ut rather by t he ext ended
time allowed for the viewer to read each layer of the video and to piece them
together something not possible in the traditional theater. The white cube
of t he galler y one o f t hose spaces s eemingly s eparated f rom s ociety
perhaps provides new dimensions to the experience of the projected image.
However, w ith film a nd video in stallation in t he 2000s, t here is ra rely
anyquestioning of the frame itself: the traditional gallery. This marks film
and video installation as different from what took place in the 1970s where
199
200
installation art was us ed to question traditional ways of exhibiting work. If

this is an unfortunate concession to the conventions of the art institution, it
also seems to allow the content of the works the examination of memory
in the form of material objects that engage our bodies to come forward.
The white walls of the gallery frame the film experience in Deans and Buckinghams work and makes it out of the ordinary. In Cokess piece, the work
situates the action of comparison not so much among elements of the work
itself but rather in the comparison between the film and its social and historical context.
If t he galler y space p resented a p roblem f or t hose a rtists in terested in
breaking free of the strictures of modern art in the 1960s and 1970s, for artists working with projected images in the last decade or so, the gallery installation space seems to have provided a framework to experience these images
and objects in a ne w way. As these media b ecome obsolete, they acquire a
powerful affect that underlines the difference between past and present.
Perhaps t he 2000s a re simila r t o t he la te ninet eenth cen tury, in w hich
documents, remains, survivals, ruins and edifices, fossils in short, indexical traces that attest to a past by merging into it achieved a kind of epistemological prestige in an era of intensifying time consciousness.50 Different
qualities o f p hotographic media a re hig hlighted in different contexts
meaning that the critical power of any medium is dep endent on its timing
and placement. The white walls of the gallery become a neutral frame once
again to showcase the material qualities of these outmoded media and equipment. These installations as heterotopias allow viewers to become aware of the
difference in our experience with contemporary and outmoded media. The
film installation becomes the means of encountering the past in the present,
allowing viewers to experience that past and to question how we represent it.
conclusion
I N S TA L L AT I O N A R T A N D M E M O R Y
There is only one Coliseum or Pantheon . . . but how many millions of potential
negatives have they shed. . . . Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing . . . and
that is all we want of it. Pull it down or burn it up, if you please.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
As Oli ver Wendell Holmes no ted in t he ninet eenth century, p hotographic

archives preserve works but also make them mobile and available. Archives
even present the possibility that the objects themselves could disappear and
be replaced by their photographic replicas. In this quotation, however, Holmes
does not grant that, once objects are part of archives, they are subject to the
conditions and rules of these organizations of knowledge. Ultimately, archives
shape our understanding of objects and events. As the photography criticism
of t he tw entieth cen tury has made c lear, i t is im portant t o q uestion t hese
technologies of vision, these historical devices, because they shape our memories and our understanding of history as well.
Installations are often made to disappear, to become objects of history and
memory. I n t his b ook, I ha ve a rgued t hat in stallations p roduce t heir o wn
archives. Lisa Le Feuvre puts it very well in her a rgument about the importance of photographs and texts to the work of Gordon Matta-Clark: Robert
Pincus-Witten, for example stated, You had to be there. I would argue that
the work is in fac t all o f t hese elements and, p erhaps more importantly, it
isalso the spaces in b etween the pieces themselves.1 She argues that works
such as Matta-Clarks need to be considered in terms of their existence over
time, even when the original works have vanished. Such an approach means
considering documentation and ephemera as part of the work. Allan Sekula
and John Tagg each argued photographic meaning is a mbiguous. A p hoto-
202
graph will reinforce whatever discourse in which it is used. Other artists that
I have discussed in t his book have made in stallations that encourage us t o
question how memory and history are constructed through objects such as
photographs and archives. Rene G reen for one has de veloped a p olitics of
representation based on these ideas.
The heightened consciousness of ephemerality and history has b een part
of the understanding of modernity since t he nineteenth century due to the
rapid changes that are an inherent part of modernization. In the 1980s, Craig
Owens considered t he issue o f ephemerality in t he context of mo dernity:
Ifthe modern artist was exho rted to concentrate on the ephemeral, however, it was because it was ephemeral, that is it threatened to disappear without a trace. Baudelaire conceived modern art at least in part as the rescuing
of modernity for eternity.2
In his essay on allegory in postmodernism, Craig Owens offers the theory
that modernism has always been concerned about the passage of time and, in
the form of allegory, has brooded over it. Allegory, as Benjamin says, is one
of the ways of saving things from disappearance in the passage of time. Following Benjamins description of allegory, Owens connects allegory to the
photograph. It is the photograph that preserves the ephemeral incidents of
modern life. And therefore, allegory is closely connected to the archive.
Although site-specific art and installation art are not always identical, they
often sha re t he q uality o f ep hemerality.3 In the work of Robert Smithson,
Owens connects photography and site-specific art, declaring Smithson to be
an allegorist. Photographys importance in a w ork such as Spiral Jetty highlights the fragmentary nature of the work its own ephemerality and concentrates the desire to preserve the work. Photography and language in Smithsons work, according to Owens, are both extraneous and intrinsic.4
I have argued something similar in relation to the works discussed in this
book. The book traces a constellation of relationships that are revealed when
one considers photography and memory in the context of installation art. The
relationships b etween in stallation a rt a nd i ts p hotographic r epresentation,
and the relationships between image, memory, experience, and archives, are
present in the works in the 1970s. I nstallation art and site-specific art since
the 1970s have raised questions about experience, memory, and representation. To paraphrase critic Ellen Handy, many installations are as sensitive to
history and memory as painting is to light.5
CO N C LU S I O N
Perhaps it is fair to say that these postmedium practices allow for contingency, in Mary Ann Doanes terms. Anything can be photographed; anything
can b e pa rt o f in stallation a rt, p erformance, a nd s o f orth. Installation a rt
distinguished itself from modernist art by expanding the limits of painting.
Allan Kaprows environments were inspired by the large-scale paintings of
American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. According to Kaprow, Pollock destroyed painting by pushing beyond the limits of the canvas to real
life.6 I n K aprows c haracterization, Pollock ena bled a rtists t o p ut a f rame
around anything and to declare it art. The frame of Kaprows art came in the
form of institutional sanction of the universities for whom he worked and of
galleries and museums administered via photography and language. The installation work that is dis cussed in t he first chapter raises questions about
the frame in the wake of Kaprows and others work in the 1960s and beyond.
The works discussed take into account three principal elements derived from
writings on Minimalism: the viewer, the artwork, and the space of exhibition.
In many of the works discussed in t his chapter, the notion of the frame of
installation expands to include the space it is produced and exhibited in, to
the temporal framework of the art object and viewers experience, and finally
to the institutional structures and systems of power in which the art is produced and viewed.
Chapter 1 argues that the catalogs and photographs of a work become an
institutional frame for installations. The frame of the works of installation art
in the form of catalogs and published photographs comes to replace the piece
once the exhibition is o ver. The photographic documentation and catalogs
inevitably shape our understanding of the history of these works. It is t his
aspect of photography that suggests that it is more important than mere documentation of installation art. I us ed Jacques Derridas term supplement to
capture t he complexity of t his relationship. The notion of t he supplement
reveals that there is a co ntingent quality to installation art as t here is t o a
photograph: it can contain almost anything.7
Not all works of installation art take history and memory as their subject
matter. But artists who are interested in them not only are concerned about
rescuing modernity for eternity but also have used their installations cum
photographic archives, collections, and even cinema spaces to ask questions
about how contemporary society cultivates memory and constructs history.
In installation art in the 1980s to the 2000s, memory and history are exam-
203
204
ined via critiques of subjectivity, identity, and institutional racism, as Jennifer

Gonzlez has argued. Art of this sort began to include social history, anthropology, and other disciplines.8 Installation seems particularly appropriate for
this work because it encourages viewers to ask questions about how they are
seeing, the context of viewing, and what is being looked at.
This book takes this dimension of installation art into account in the works
of several artists beginning in the 1970s. The representation and understanding of history and memory is one of the important themes of Rene Greens
work, but it is als o important in different ways in Ann H amiltons installations, Gordon Matta-Clarks, Matthew Buckinghams, Tacita Deans, and other
artists discussed in this book. The time period of the 1970s where this book
begins was a turning point in the interest in memory and history in art and
other parts of the culture.
The four chapters of this book illustrate the different aspects of installation
art that are revealed when photography is taken into consideration as an aspect of t he work. Photography, as I ha ve argued, supports t he practice of
installation but is also used as a critical tool in the context of installation art
in the 1990s a nd 2000s. F or instance, in t he first chapter, I have considered
what happens when photographs are all that remains of installation works, as
in t he works displayed in t he exhibition Rooms and G ordon Matta-Clarks
Splitting. In the catalog for Rooms, what is em phasized is no t so much the
individual works themselves but rather the qualities of PS1 as a n exhibition
space. The catalog showcases PS1 as a ne w institution with new ideas about
exhibition. In Gordon Matta-Clarks work, the photograph becomes a way of
framing time and space marking the difference between lived experience
and its representation. In the Artists Space exhibition, language takes over the
role of photography in the catalog. The catalogs and artists books, as smallscale archives, have guided the history of these works.
In 1980, Craig Owens described site-specific art as hybrid and discursive.
The work in the 1978 Artists Space exhibition is a good example of this type
of w ork. The w ork o f A drian P iper, L ouise L awler, Cind y S herman, a nd
Christopher DArcangelo invited viewers to think about how they looked at
art and understood art in the context of the particular art institution of Artists Space at a pa rticular moment in time . Adrian Pipers piece used documentary photography in o rder to connect the fine art context to a b roader
practice of looking at and reading images that has racial consequences.
CO N C LU S I O N
Pipers early participation in t he conceptual art movement and her c lose

friendship with Sol LeWitt were important to Greens work. And t he influence of both artists work can be seen in Greens interest in social interactions
as subject matter for art as well as seriality as a f ormal device. Rene Green
begins with the historical remains of Smithsons Partially Buried Woodshed
and in her w ork asks t he viewer to go beyond the traditional historical accounts of Smithsons work and the pivotal day of May 4, 1970, and place them
in the context of personal memory and the culture at large. In the context of
this installation as a rchive, she in vites vie wers to question how t he photograph is read and how the photograph acquires meaning in particular orders.
I situated Greens work in the context of a history of photography considered
as evidence in the archive by noting how photographs were collected in the
nineteenth century along with other kinds of artifacts in colonialist expeditions. These archives have had social consequences in terms of race and social relationships but also in terms of our understanding of the nineteenth
century. Photography and installation art are part of Greens critical tools.
And her consideration of documentary remains in the form of photographs
spurred an examination of the history of the 1970s.
The documentation of installation art, nevertheless, raises problems for installation artists. Images of installation must substitute for direct experience of
the work. Ann Hamiltons work emphasizes bodily experience that includes
the senses of touch, smell, hearing, and sight. The photograph represents a
reduction of that multifarious and immersive experience to one of vision. For
this r eason, p hotographic do cumentation b ecomes a c hallenge. N evertheless, the photographic documentation of ephermal, site-specific works of art,
including performance and installation, allow them to circulate and gain status in a global art world.
I link H amiltons w ork t o M atta-Clarks f or t heir m utual in terest in t he
transformation of bodily experience to image. For Matta-Clark, this relationship becomes an important part of his w ork, out of necessity. For the most
part, his works did not get exhibited in traditional art institutions and were
destroyed soon after they were made. Hamiltons are similarly ephemeral, but
for her the question of experience and its representation is also part of the
content of the work. The documentation of the pieces is simila rly careful.
Other works of art interested in t he present-tense, bodily experience raise
similar issues in relation to photographic documentation.
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206
In the moment where digital overtakes analog photography, photographs

and film have become historical objects themselves. In the film installations
of the last chapter of this book, a new understanding of photographic media
seems to have emerged in the last few decades because of the slow passing of
analog media. In the work of artists, such as Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, and Tony Cokes, it is the media themselves that become objects of interest. In the 1960s and 1970s, which is the focus of Chrissie Iless exhibition
at the Whitney titled Into the Light: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art,
the installation with slide projector or film projector did not inspire feelings
of nostalgia or temporal dislocation. They represented instead tools for the
display of art in spaces. It is in t he context of contemporary installation art,
however, t hat t hese ob jects b ecome ha ndles f or nost algia, a nd t he a rtists
mourn the passing of these media that were important to art in the twentieth
century. By using the work of F. R. Ankersmit, Ive argued that this of melancholy and nostalgia evoked by the ephemerality of these media can be used
to gain a critical perspective on contemporary culture.
It is eq ually notable that each of the artists discussed in t his chapter was
also born in the late 1950s and 1960s and each has a different relationship to
new media t han older generations. In the work of artists who came of age
inthe 1980s and 1990s, the theme of history comes to the fore. Placed in the
context o f a rt galler ies, in t he c lassic w hite c ube, film p rojectors a nd film
become interesting sculptural objects. The film and the film projector are as
sensuous as the beeswax or charcoal sticks in Ann Hamiltons installations. In
the work of Tacita Dean and Matthew Buckingham, the film becomes both a
carrier of the content of memory and a mnemonic device itself. It is the material qualities of the photographic media that trigger associations and memories in addition to the pictures they display.
Since the 1960s and 1970s, artists feel comfortable taking the risk of producing works of art that disappear. To take photography into account when
considering installation art only enriches our understanding of the practice
of installation art. This book adds a dimension to the study of installation art
by considering its relationship to its supporting media. Photography of and
as installation provides a lens through which to consider broader societal issues, suc h as ho w hist ory was wr itten a nd w hat memo ries a re co nsidered
worth keeping.
CO N C LU S I O N
Because of the problem of epic forgetting, other members of the Frankfurt S chool ha ve r egarded memo ry as p otentially sub versive. I n his 1964
book, One-Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, one of the philosophers of
the counterculture, writes of the resistance in co nsumer societies to understanding history: Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive
contents of memory.9
Photographic media, which were thought to stop time and preserve faithfully moments of time in t he photographic surface, are now seen to be subject to time and its passage as well. These objects have become ruins. Every
dramatic technological change, historical trauma, and social shift seems to
be followed by a period o f reflection on history and memory an effort to
preserve and to understand these events. The last forty years have witnessed
these kinds of changes in culture and art. As ephermerality intensifies at the
end of the twentieth century with, for instance, the shift to digital technology,
a keen interest in history and memory has emerged. It seems absolutely necessary t o avoid t he c ultural p roblem o f f orgetting, a nd in stallation a rt has
provided a space in which to come to grips with these the transformations and
to question them.
207
notes
Introduction
1. Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xvxix.
2. Joan Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory: Images of Recollection and
Remembrance (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009), 5. The art historian Joan Gibbons
suggests that the interest in memory coincides with a shift from totalizing
epistemologies of modernism to the more fragmented and subjective modalities
ofpostmodernism.
3. Amelia Jones, Body Art: Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1998), 33.
4. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Notes on Site-Specificity, in Space,
Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 52.
5. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, 1969), 15960.
6. Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency,
the Archive (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 13.
7. Both Joan Gibbons and Lisa Saltzman cite this passage in Proust as well.
8. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 9.
9. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (1911; repr., New
York: Henry Holt, 1926), 3056. Bergson compares it directly to film.
10. Craig Ireland, The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late
Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 2004), 6366.
11. The essay was reprinted in Clement Greenbergs Art and Culture: Critical
Essays (1961; repr., Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 6. Greenberg writes, This
210
N OT E S TO I N T R O D U C T I O N
constraint, once the world of common extraverted experience has been renounced, can only be found in the very processes or disciplines by which art
andliterature have already imitated the former. These themselves become the
subject matter of art and literature.
12. Greenberg, Art and Culture, 157.
13. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood, in Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 168.
14. Barbara Clausen et al., After the Act: The (Re)Presentation of Performance
Art (Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 2007), 117.
15. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon, France: Le Presses du Rel,
1998).
16. Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge,
2005).
17. Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October 110 (Fall
2004): 5179.
18. Jones, Body Art, 35. Includes a direct quotation from Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1978), 163. See also Douglas Davis, Performance Photography, Connoisseur
(March 1985):14445; Anne M. Wagner, Performance, Video, and the Rhetoric
of Presence, October 91 (Winter 2000): 5980.
19. Jones, Body Art, 37.
20. Clausen et al., After the Act, 7.
21. Clausen et al., After the Act, 19.
22. Martha Buskirk, The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005), 59107.
23. For instance, Philip Auslander in Clausen et al., After the Act, 25, and
Babette Mangolte in Clausen et al., After the Act, 38.
24. For a more comprehensive account of the varieties of memory practice in
contemporary art, see Gibbons, Contemporary Art and Memory.
25. Craig Owens, Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1992), 4087.
26. Owens, Beyond Recognition, 5658.
27. James Meyer, The Functional Site; or, The Transformation of Site-Specificity,
in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25.
28. Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation
(London: Routledge, 2000), 12.
29. Kwon, One Place after Another, 43.
N OT E S TO I N T R O D U C T I O N
30. Kevin Melchionne, Rethinking Site-Specificity: Some Critical and Philosophical Problems, Art Criticism 12, no. 2 (1997): 40. Melchionne published an
article that elaborated on the various types or degrees of site-specificity. One was
historical/political and referred to works that recover history or political aspects
of a site.
31. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism and Utopia, in Utopia/Post-Utopia
(Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1988), 14.
32. Jameson is not the only one who describes time in the late twentieth century this way. Baudrillard and Michel Foucault also describe time in these terms.
Baudrillard and Foucault see the 1960s as a time of endings in which time has
become materialized or spatialized.
33. Jameson, Postmodernism and Utopia, 156.
35. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (1981;
repr., Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 8.
36. Grant Kester, The Rise and Fall of Baudrillard, New Art Examiner 15, no. 3
(November 1987): 20.
37. Kate Linker, From Imitation, to the Copy, to Just Effect: On Reading Jean
Baudrillard, Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1984): 47.
38. Thomas Lawson, Forum: Generation In Vitro, Artforum 23, no. 1 (September 1984): 99; John Howell and Lisa Liebmann, Forum: Retro/Trends,
Artforum 22, no. 3 (November 1983): 73.
39. Lawson, Forum, 99.
40. Linker, From Imitation, 4748.
41. Kester, The Rise and Fall, 2023.
42. Hal Foster, The Art of Cynical Reason, in The Return of the Real, 99127
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). However, Grant Kester critiqued the art
worlds fascination with Baudrillard by noting that the death of the real or the
disappearance of history is only persuasive in a very few Western cities. Meanwhile, industry had moved on to developing nations where issues of production
and collectivity are still very much alive and important.
43. Kester, The Rise and Fall; there are other cultural commentators who
needto be mentioned in this regard. Andreas Huyssen, a literary and art critic,
haswritten two books on memory culture, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a
Culture of Amnesia and, most recently, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the
Politics of Memory. He links the interest in memory to questions and concerns
about burgeoning archives and documentation but also to the interest in the Holocaust in Germany beginning in the 1970s. In addition, he cites the politicization of
211
212
N OT E S TO PAG E S I N T R O D U C T I O N
memory and its use in documenting genocides around the world in the twentieth
century. In his Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis, Richard Terdiman,
a literary critic with a new historicist bent, takes the thesis that a memory crisis in
the nineteenth century produced specific approaches to literature and semiotics.
Pierre Nora, a French historian, whose article Between Memory and History: Les
Lieux de Mmoire appeared in the 1989 issue of Representations, is often cited by
art critics in relation to the issue of memory. Pierre Nora, Between Memory and
History: Les Lieux de Mmoire, Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 724. Lastly,
James Young wrote The Texture of Memory, a survey and critique of Holocaust
monuments in contemporary Germany.
44. David Deitcher, William Olander, and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, The Art
ofMemory: The Loss of History (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art,
1985), 50.
45. These ideas were taken up again in the collection of essays on photography
The Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, edited by Richard Bolton
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), to which Solomon-Godeau was a contributor.
Also in this volume, Benjamin H. D. Buchlohs essay From Factura to Factography
addresses the ambivalence of photography in critical practice.
46. Mary Jane Jacob, Places with a Past: New Site-Specific Art at Charlestons
Spoleto Festival (New York: Rizzoli Publications, 1991), 1320.
47. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational
Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 105.
48. Lynne Cooke, Brian Curiger, and Greg Hilty, Doubletake: Collective Memory
and Current Art (New York: Parkett, 1992), 23.
49. Cooke, Curiger, and Hilty, Doubletake, 26. Another European exhibition
that used the topic of memory was The Sublime Void: On the Memory of the
Imagination at the Koninklijk Museum in Antwerp in 1993. It included work
byRachel Whiteread, Jannis Kounellis, Juan Muoz, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Wall,
Michelangelo Pistoletto, and others.
50. Quoted in Ted Gott, Dont Leave Me This Way: Art in the Age of AIDS
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1994), 57.
51. Douglas Crimp, Mourning and Militancy, October 51 (Winter 1989):
1718.
52. Gott, Dont Leave Me This Way, 3451.
53. Gott, Dont Leave Me This Way, 6970.
54. Lisa Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in
Contemporary Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1
55. Nicholas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, and Michael Petry, Installation Art in
the New Millennium: The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames and Hudson,
2003), 9.
56. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on
Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 7.
57. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and
Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
160.
58. Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 23.
Chapter 1: Expanding the Frame
1. See also Reiss, From Margin to Center, 10931.
2. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xii.
3. Brian ODoherty, Inside the White Cube, Part I: Notes on the Gallery Space,
Artforum 14, no. 7 (March 1976): 25.
4. ODoherty, Inside the White Cube, Part I, 25.
5. Brian ODoherty, Inside the White Cube, Part II: The Eye and the Spectator,
Artforum 14, no. 8 (April 1976): 27.
6. ODoherty, Inside the White Cube, Part II, 3334.
7. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59.
8. John C. Welchman, In and Around the Second Frame, in The Rhetoric of
the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996), 213.
9. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 61.
10. Linda Blumberg, program director of PS1, statement in Rooms, PS1,
Institute for Art and Urban Resources catalog, designed and edited by Stephen
Alexander and Eugenie Diserio (New York: The Institute, 1977), 133.
11. Martin Beck, Alternative: Space, in Alternative Art, New York, 19651985,
ed. Julie Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 257.
12. Nancy Foote, Apotheosis of the Crummy Space, Artforum International 15,
no. 2 (October 1976): 2837.
13. Jos Blisle, David Rabinowitch (Montreal: Muse dart contemporain de
Montral, 2003), 10.
14. Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, October 8 (Spring
1979): 3044. In this article, Krauss mapped a field of sculptural practice based on
213
214
the fixed cultural categories of architecture and landscape, from which she derived
sculpture, site construction, marked sites, and axiomatic structures. In these new
categories, Krauss could fit site-specific earthworks, outdoor sculptural arrangements, and other sculptural practices, plotting their positions relative to the
category of sculpture. The idea of a field of relationships is based on this idea.
15. Quoted in Stephen Alexander and Eugenie Diserio, eds. and designers,
Richard Tuttle on Richard Serra, in Rooms, PS1, Institute for Art and Urban
Resources catalog (New York: The Institute, 1977), 69.
16. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 123, 126.
17. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 124.
18. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 7677. She cites Henri Bergson, who
indicates that consciousness occurs as a result of perception, and, therefore, the
mind is aware of only a moment that has passed and never experiences the present
moment as it happens. There is always a lag between perceptual stimulus and the
minds conscious awareness.
21. Krauss, Notes on the Index, 69.
22. Krauss, Notes on the Index, Part 2, 70.
25. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 304.
30. Quoted in Alexander and Diserio, Rooms, 122.
31. Foote, Apotheosis, 37.
32. See the useful summary of the uses of photography in Matta-Clarks work in
Christian Kravagnas chapter Its Nothing Worth Documenting If Its Not Difficult
to Get: On the Documentary Nature of Photography and Film in the Work of
Gordon Matta-Clark, in Gordon Matta-Clark, ed. Corinne Diserens (London:
Phaidon, 2003).
33. Pamela M. Lee, Gordon Matta-Clark: Object to Be Destroyed (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2000), 3638.
34. Moure, Gordon Matta-Clark, 252.
35. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century
French Thoug ht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 85, 16064.
36. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western
Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), 559.
37. See, for instance, Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and
the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge, 2006), 45. Amelia Jones connects
this notion of knowledge directly to photography.
38. Summers, Real Spaces, 603.
42. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 305.
43. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 306.
44. Mary Jane Jacob, Gordon Matta-Clark: A Retrospective (Chicago: Museum
of Contemporary Art, 1985), 2023.
45. Mary Warner Marien, Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History,
18391900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 35.
46. Marien, Photography, 3.
47. Tina Kukielski, In the Spirit of the Vegetable: The Early Works of Gordon
Matta-Clark (196971), in Gordon Matta-Clark: You Are the Measure, ed.
Elisabeth Sussman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art), 3637.
48. Kukielski, In the Spirit, 43.
49. Jeffrey Meikle, American Plastics: A Cultural History (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1995), Kindle edition, chap. 1.
50. Lee, Gordon Matta-Clark, 6768.
51. Anne M. Wagner, Splitting and Doubling: Gordon Matta-Clark and the
Body of Sculpture, Grey Room 14 (Winter 2004): 35.
52. For more, see Lee, Holes of History, in Object to Be Destroyed.
53. Craig Owens, Earthwords, in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 41; and James Meyer, Nostalgia
and Memory: Legacies of the 1960s in Recent Work, in Painting, Object, Film,
Concept: Selections from the Herbig Collection (New York: Christies, 1998), 2627.
55. Karl Marx, Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill,
1963), 12425.
58. Al Brunelle, The Great Divide: Anarchitecture by Gordon Matta-Clark,
Art in America 62, no. 5 (SeptemberOctober 1974): 92.
59. Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (New York: Loft Books, 1974).
215
216
60. Wagner, Splitting and Doubling, 35. For more comments on Matta-Clarks
photo-collages, see Simon Morrissey, Gordon Matta-Clark, Creative Camera
337(December 1995/January 1996): 40; Lisa Le Feuvre, The W-hole Story, Art
Monthly 255 (April 2002): 1215; Judith Russi Kirshner, Non-uments, Artforum
24, no. 2 (October 1985): 1028.
62. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Zone Books, 1966, 1988), 70.
63. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 32.
64. Julie Ault, Chronology, in Alternative Art, New York, 19651985, ed. Julie
Ault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 35.
65. Claudia Gould and Valerie Smith, eds., 5000 Artists Return to Artists Space
(New York: Artists Space, 1998), 58.
66. Janelle Reiring, press release from Artists Space, summer 1978.
67. Janelle Reiring, interview with author, June 24, 2009.
68. Adrian Piper, Adrian Piper: A Retrospective (Baltimore: University of
Maryland, 1999).
69. Louise Lawler, Louise Lawler and Others (Basel, Switzerland: Kunstmuseum
Basel, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), 2021.
70. In addition to this work, Lawler designed a logo for the exhibition that
appeared in the catalog and throughout Lower Manhattan, extending her work
outside the traditional exhibition space.
71. Gould and Smith, 5000 Artists, 101.
72. Louise Lawler, questionnaire prepared by author, June 30, 2009.
73. Quoted in Gould and Smith, 5000 Artists, 97.
74. Janelle Reiring, ___________, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and Cindy
Sherman Have Agreed to Participate in an Exhibition Organized by Janelle Reiring
at Artists Space, September 23 to October 28, 1978 (New York: Committee for the
Visual Arts, 1978), 1314.
75. Gwyn Prins, The Battle for Control of the Camera in Late NineteenthCentury Western Zambia, in Anthropology and Photography, 18601920, ed.
Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 221.
76. These works include Allan Sekulas The Body and the Archive, in The
Contest of Meaning: Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton, 34489
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); On the Invention of Photographic Meaning,
Artforum 13, no. 2 (January 1975): 3645; Martha Roslers In, Around and
Afterthoughts: Notes on Documentary Photography, in The Contest of Meaning:
Critical Histories of Photography, ed. Richard Bolton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), 30341; and Roland Barthes, The Rhetoric of the Image, in Image, Music,
Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
77. Lawler, questionnaire.
78. Reiring, interview.
79. April Kingsley, Art Goes Underground, Village Voice, October 18, 1978, 122.
80. Lawler also says that these images were never printed. Lawler,
questionnaire.
81. Douglas Crimp, Pictures, October 8 (Spring 1979): 7588.
Chapter 2: The Politics of Representation
1. Rene Green, Alexander Alberro, Nora M. Alter, and Nuria Enguita Mayo,
Shadows and Signals (Barcelona: Fundcio Antoni Tapies, 2000), 4647. Most of
the descriptions of these pieces were derived from Alex Alberros descriptions in
this catalog.
2. Part of the material in this chapter was published previously in The Family
Slide Show as Critical History in Rene Greenes Video Partially Buried Continued, Thi rd Text 21, no. 4 (July 2007): 44150.
3. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 184.
4. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the PostMedium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 2629. Krauss labels
this relationship the phenomenological vector of the work.
5. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Warburgs Paragon? The End of Collage and
Photomontage in Postwar Europe, in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and
Archiving in Art, ed. Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen (Munich: Prestel,
1998), 54.
6. Buchloh, Warburgs Paragon? 59.
7. Hal Foster, An Archival Impulse, October 110 (Fall 2004): 36. Foster
includes Green among the group, although he does not elaborate on her work.
8. Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2001), 21415.
9. Elizabeth A. Brown, Social Studies: 4 + 4 Young Americans, Allen Memorial
Art Gallery Bulletin 44, no. 1 (1990): 51.
10. See James Meyer, Artist as Nomad, in Space, Site, Intervention: Situating
Installation Art, ed. Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2000), 27.
217
218
11. Sekula, On the Invention, 36.

12. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 67.
13. Alex Alberro notes that Green practices a form of Foucaultian genealogy in
her work. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 25.
14. Nora, Between Memory and History, 1214.
15. Hollis Frampton, Circles of Confusion: Film Photography and Video Texts,
19681980 (Rochester, NY: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983), 75.
16. Quoted in Marien, Photography, 7778.
18. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 18801918 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 39.
19. Elizabeth Edwards, Photographs as Objects of Memory, in Material
Memories, ed. Marius Kwint, Christopher Breward, and Jeremy Aynsley (Oxford,
UK: Berg, 1999), 221.
20. Louis-Jacques Mand Daguerre, Daguerreotype, in Classic Essays on
Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leetes Island Books,
1980),12.
21. Prins, The Battle for Control, 221.
22. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Objects of Ethnography, in Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D.
Laine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 388.
23. Christian Metz, Photography and Fetish, October 34 (Fall 1985): 84.
AllanSekula also discusses the fetishism of photographs. See Sekula, On the
Invention, 38.
24. For more on this subject, see Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning:
Critical Histories of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989).
25. See Edward Steichen, A Special Portfolio of Photographs by Ezra Stoller of
the Family of Man Exhibition on the Walls of the Museum of Modern Art, New
York, in The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), 195207.
26. Steichen, A Special Portfolio, 4.
27. Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 24.
28. Svetlana Alpers, Museums as a Way of Seeing, in Exhibiting Cultures:
ThePoetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Laine
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 26.
29. Jennifer A. Gonzlez, Siting Histories: Material Display and the Politics
ofDisplay in the Work of Fred Wilson, Pepn Osorio, and Amalia Mesa-Bains,
19851995, PhD diss., University of California, Santa Cruz, 1996.
30. Mary Ann Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibitions at

the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 1822.
31. Conceptual artists in the 1960s took up nonaesthetic, document-like form
in their photo work in a critique of institutions that upheld formalist aesthetic
photography conventions. Jeff Wall has argued that such practices were a critique
of the modernist photographic aesthetics that overvalued technical skill, uniqueness, and serious subject matter. Jeff Wall, Marks of Indifference: Aspects of
Photography in or as Conceptual Art, in Reconsidering the Object of Art, 196575,
ed. Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995),
25865.
32. Sekula, On the Invention, 36.
33. Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 22.
34. Rene Green, questionnaire prepared by author, November 2008.
35. Jennifer A. Gonzlez, Subject to Display: Reframing Race in Contemporary
Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 24549.
36. Fred Wilson, The Museum: Mixed Metaphors (Seattle: Seattle Art Museum,
1993), 2932.
37. Robert Morris, Notes on Sculpture, Part III: Notes and Nonsequitors, in
Art in Theory: 19001990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison
and Paul Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 819.
38. Susan Krane and Bruce Jenkins, Hollis Frampton: Recollections and Recreations (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1984), 10.
39. Rachel Moore, Hollis Frampton: Nostalgia (London: Afterall Books, 2006).
41. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 51. Please see, in particular, Nora Alters
chapter Beyond the Frame: Renee Greens Video Practice.
42. Yvonne Rainer, Journeys from Berlin, DVD (New York: Zeitgeist Films,
1980).
43. This is excluded in Rainers version. Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter
Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 182.
44. Green et al., Shadows and Signals, 145.
45. Rene Green, World Tour (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art,
1993), E57.
46. Manovich, Language of New Media, 240.
47. Rene Green, Partially Buried in Three Parts: Extract, in Ruins in Reverse:
Time and Progress in Contemporary Art, ed. Grant Kester, CEPA Journal (Buffalo,
NY: Center for the Exploratory and Perpetual Arts [CEPA], September 1998
March 1999), 34.
219
220
48. Rene Green, Between and Including (Vienna: Secession, 2001), 61.
49. Darsie Alexander et al., Slide Show: The Projected Image in Contemporary
Art (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), ix.
50. Frampton, Circles of Confusion, 111.
51. Rene Green, questionnaire prepared by author, May 2006.
52. Douglas Collins, The Story of Kodak (New York: Abrams, 1990), 263.
53. Eastman Kodak Company, Adventures in Outdoor Color Slides (Rochester,
NY: Kodak Sales Division, 1962), 44.
54. Pierre Bourdieu, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art, trans. Shaun Whiteside
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 24.
55. Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York: Free
Press, 1979), 14.
56. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001),
4243.
57. Nancy Martha West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2000), 5.
58. The piece is Mirror Displacement on a Compost Heap, 1969, Dsseldorf,
Germany. Guglielmo Bargellesi-Severi, ed., Robert Smithson: Slideworks (Milan,
Italy: Carlo Frua, 1997), 125.
59. Owens, Earthwords, 4041.
60. Robert Smithson, Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996), 119.
61. Robert Smithson, Hotel Palenque, 196972, Parkett 43 (March 1995):
11732.
62. Kwon, One Place after Another, 51.
63. See also Gonzlez, Subject to Display, 24149.
64. Rosalind Krauss, Photographys Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View, Art
Journal 42, no. 4 (Winter 1982): 31618.
Chapter 3: The Poetics of Experience
1. Ann Hamilton, e-mail message to author, August 21, 2001.
2. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed.
Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 4763.
3. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1981), 92.
4. Ann Hamilton, Tomoaki Kitagawa, Bernhart Schwenk, and Takao Ueda, the
picture is still (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2003).
5. Hamilton, e-mail message.
6. Ann Hamilton, personal communication, 2011.

7. Joan Simon, Ann Hamilton (New York: Abrams, 2002), 256.
8. Simon, Ann Hamilton, 11.
9. Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 6366.
10. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Perigee Books, 1934), 246.
11. Hans-Robert Jauss, Question and Answer: Forms of Dialogic Understanding,
as quoted in Ireland, Subaltern Appeal, 44.
12. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a
Universal Them e (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 7. See footnote 33.
15. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 2431, 6982.
16. Robert Morris, The Present Tense of Space, in Continuous Project Altered
Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 182.
17. Rosalind Krauss, The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,
October 54 (Autumn 1990): 911.
18. Jeff Kelley, Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 7.
19. Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 9.
20. Krauss, Cultural Logic, 7.
21. Krauss, Cultural Logic, 1516.
22. Kate Mondloch, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 5659. Mondloch refers to Krausss
assessment of the late-capitalist museum as a place to experience experience.
23. Chrissie Iles, Shamim M. Momin, and Debra Singer, Whitney Biennial 2004
(New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2004), 243.
24. Mary Jane Jacob and Lynn Gumpert, Christian Boltanski: Lessons of
Darkness (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1988), 54.
25. Jacob and Gumpert, Christian Boltanski, 71.
26. Hugh M. Davies and Lynda Forsha, A Conversation with Ann Hamilton,
in Ann Hamilton (San Diego: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1991), 70.
27. Ann Hamilton, personal communication, 2011.
28. Ann Hamilton, unpublished lecture notes, 2001.
29. Anna Chave, Sculpture, Gender, and the Value of Labor, American Art 24,
no. 1 (Spring 2010): 2629.
30. Davies and Forsha, A Conversation with Ann Hamilton, 70.
31. Jay, Songs of Experience, 331.
221
222
32. E. P. Tho mpson, The Essential E. P. Thom pson, ed. Dorothy Tho mpson (New
York: New Press, 2001), 62.
33. Tho mpson, Essential E. P. Thom pson, 61.
34. Eileen Boris, Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris, and the Craftsman Ideal in
America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), xi.
35. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 98.
36. Bruce Kaiper, The Human Object and Its Capitalist Image, Left Curve,
no.5 (FallWinter 1975): 43.
37. Frank B. Gilbreth, Motion Study: A Method for Increasing the Efficiency of
the Workman (1911; repr., Easton, PA: Hive Publishing, 1972), 67.
38. Gilbreth, Motion Study, 6263.
39. Quoted in Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle,
Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 15.
40. Reesa Goldberg, The Exhibited Redistributed: A Case for Reassessing
Space, in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Goldberg (London: Routledge,
1996), 35053; also cited in Richard J. Williams, After Modern Sculpture: Art in
theUnited States and Europe, 196570 (New York: Manchester University Press,
2000), 1012.
41. Ann Hamilton, notes to author, 2011.
42. Thibault Jeanson, interview with author, December 2006.
43. Ann Hamilton, interview with author, November 2006.
44. Mary Katherine Coffey, Histories That Haunt: A Conversation with Ann
Hamilton, Art Journal 60, no. 3 (Fall 2001): 2223. Hamilton gave me a revised
version of this quotation, which is what appears in this text. Ann Hamilton,
personal communication, 2011.
45. Bernard Comment, The Painted Panorama (New York: Abrams, 2000), 118.
46. Wolf Prix, The Imaging of Reality, Architecture California (May 1992): 14.
47. Craig Hodgetts, Heretical Thoughts on Architecture and Photography,
Architecture California (May 1992): 61.
48. Robert Hopkins, Picture, Image, and Experience: A Philosophical Inquiry
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
49. Hamilton et al., the picture is still.
50. Quoted in Kelley, Childsplay, 13031.
51. Buskirk, Contingent Object, 21258.
52. Ann Hamilton, interview with author, November 2006.
53. Morris, The Present Tense, 182.
54. Morris, The Present Tense. Morris is using the work of Herbert Mead as a
reference.
55. Judith Rodenbeck, Foil: Allan Kaprow before Photography, in Experiments

in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts, Events, Objects, Documents, by
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh et al. (New York: Columbia University, 1999), 58.
56. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 10.
57. Le dsir de photographier est le contraire du dsir de signifier tout prix; de
tmoigner ou dinformer. Il est de lordre de la sidration et de lillusion. De lordre
de la disparition aussi, car si quelque chose veut devenir image, ce nest pas pour
durer, cest pour mieux disparatre.
58. Tendance Floue and Jean Baudrillard, Sommes-Nous? (Paris: Nave, 2006).
59. Ann Hamilton, notes to the author.
60. Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary
Subject (London: Routledge, 2006), 6.
61. Jones, Self/Image, 56.
62. Jones, Self/Image. Jones borrows this term from Laura U. Marks.
66. Helne Cixous, Coming to Writing, in Coming to Writing and Other
Essays, ed. Deborah Jenson, trans. Sarah Cornell et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991), 4.
68. Ann Hamilton has a photographic archive of her works in her studio, and
her works up to 2000 have been described in detail and cataloged in the catalogue
raisonn by Joan Simon.
Chapter 4: Camera Obscura
1. Quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 4.
2. Sherry Turkle, ed., Evocative Objects: Things We Think With (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2007), 5.
3. James Quandt gives them a European genealogy by describing them as
Moholy-Nagy compositions. James Quandt, Tacita Dean, Schaulager Basel,
Artforum 3 (November 2006): 287.
4. Jean-Christophe Royoux uses the term in his work about Deans work in
Jean-Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner, and Germaine Greer, Tacita Dean
(London: Phaidon, 2006), 50101.
5. Royoux, Warner, and Greer, Tacita Dean, 8.
6. Tacita Dean, Floh (Gttingen, Germany: Steidl Publications, 2001).
223
224

10. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 98.
11. Foster, An Archival Impulse, 4.
12. Jennifer Uhrhane, Timeline, Photographic Resource Center at Boston
University, accessed June 14, 2011, www.godowskycolorawards.org/2009/timeline
.html.
13. Quandt, Tacita Dean, 28788.
14. Mondloch, Screens, 2.
15. Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the
Cinema (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000), 67.
17. Saltzman, Making Memory Matter. Lisa Saltzman also refers to this artwork
in her book.
18. Margaret Morse, Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the
Space In-Between, in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed.
Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture, 1990), 154.
19. Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It Vanishes, 2001, accessed May 11,
2011, www.matthewbuckingham.net/Image%20Absalon.html.
20. Mark Godfrey, Artist as Historian, October 120 (Spring 2007): 14072.
This essay is a useful source for information on Buckinghams work.
21. Raymond Fielding, ed., A Technological History of Motion Pictures and
Television (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 119, 130.
22. Fielding, A Technological History, 13233.
24. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (1968; repr.,
London: Verso, 1996), 13540.
25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 15960.
26. Kern, Culture of Time, 39.
28. Godfrey, Artist as Historian, 15962.
29. Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence:
19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
31. Quandt, Tacita Dean, 287.
N OT E S TO CO N C LU S I O N
32. Debra Singer, The Way Things Never Were: Nostalgias Possibilities and
theUnpredictable Past, in Whitney Biennial 2004, by Chrissie Iles, Shamim M.
Monim, and Debra Singer, 2233 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art,
2004).
33. Malcolm Turvey et al., Roundtable: The Projected Image in Contemporary
Art, October 104 (Spring 2003): 75.
34. F. R. Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience (Stanford, CA: Stanford
35. Foucault, Of Other Spaces, 2225.
36. Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night
(New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2006), 244.
37. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 31.
38. Tony Cokes, questionnaire prepared by author, September 2007.
39. Fred Barnum, His Masters Voice, in America: Ninety Years of Communications Pioneering, and Progress: Victor Talking Machine Company (Camden, NJ:
General Electric, 1991), 251, 31819.
40. Patrick McGeehan, Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales, New
York Times, December 6, 2009.
41. Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro: The Culture of Revival (London: Tha mes and
Hudson, 2006), 44.
42. Davis, Yearning for Yesterday, 90.
43. Jameson, Postmodernism, 290.
44. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 43.
45. Jameson, Postmodernism, 156.
48. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), xx.
50. Philip Rosen, quoted in Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 221.
Conclusion
1. James Atlee and Lisa Le Feuvre, Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between
(London: Nazraeli Press, 2003), 7.
2. Craig Owens, The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism, in Beyond Recognition, ed. Scott Bryson et al. (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1992), 77.
225
226
N OT E S TO CO N C LU S I O N
3. Owens, Allegorical Impulse, 5658.

4. The Dia Art Foundation has an ongoing effort to document Spiral Jetty
in order to preserve it. There are concerns about the work because of not only
interventions by people who visit the site and take rocks but also encroaching
development. Randy Kennedy, November 17, 2009.
5. Ellen Handy, Installations and History, Arts Magazine, February 1989, 62.
6. Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, ArtNews 57, no. 6 (1958): 56.
7. I use this term keeping Mary Ann Doanes and Martha Buskirks work in
mind.
8. Lisa G. Corrin, Installing History, Art Papers 18, no. 4 (JulyAugust
1994):6.
9. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 98.
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index
Abstract Expressionism, 203
acetate film, 174, 176
Adorno, Theodor, 94, 135, 18182, 188
African American history, 90
African Americans, 76, 92
agency, issue of, 123, 134, 154
AIDS, 1617
Akira Ikeda Gallery, 117, 147, 148,
15152, 153, 157
Alberro, Alex, 115
Albers, Anni, On Designing, 13132
aleph (Hamilton), 140
Alexander, Darsie, 102, 107
Alignment Series: Disaster Story Line
(Getting It Straight) (Baldessari), 38
allegory, 202
Alpers, Svetlana, 87
Alter, Nora, 96
amateur photography: conventions of,
110; home movies, 17677, 18182;
slide shows, 1019; snapshots, 100,
1035, 10911, 166, 179
ambiguity, Green and, 10911
American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee, 93
analog media, 20, 22, 73, 147, 16365,

17071, 183, 18889, 194, 206; a nd
memory, 19798. See also types of
media
Andre, Carl, 28
Animal Locomotion: Walking Taking Off
Hat (Muybridge), 6
Ankersmit, F. R., 187, 195, 197, 206
anthropological displays, 8586, 90
anti-aestheticism, 7576
Apple Shrine (Kaprow), 126
Arago, Dominique Franois, 83, 103
archaeology, 8081, 9091
architecture, 4244, 4951, 53, 108,
130, 143, 153, 165, 172; embodied,
13334; photography of, 14546.
See also Matta-Clark, Gordon; sitespecific art
Architecture California, 146
archival art, 8993
archival artists, 167
archival impulse, 3, 36, 131
archival memory, 182; contrasted with
bodily memory, 17778
archival structure, 78, 97, 101, 11415
240
INDEX
Archive of Contemporary History (Bott),

91
archives: catalogs as, 3840; journeys
through, 96100; and work of Rene
Green, 7780
archiving practice, 3
Arranged by Louise Lawler, 92
art. See archival art; body art; installation
art; performance art; site-specific art
Art: 21, Art in the Twenty-First Century
(television show), 2
Artforum, 14
artifacts, 167, 181, 19091, 199, 205;
African, 90; collection of, 84; Greens
use of, 73, 77, 81, 83; juxtaposition
of, in installation art, 7980; photographs as, 84
art institution: as de facto frame, 26;
franchising of, 127. See also names of
museums and galleries
artists book, 5057, 16667
Artists Space (New York), 24, 5771, 92,
204
Art of Memory, The: The Loss of History
(exhibition), 14
art practices: ephemeral, 3, 910, 23;
feminist, 123
arts and crafts movement, 13537
Arts of the Environment, 11
artwork, relationship with exhibition
space and viewer, 2935
Asher, Michael, 65, 130
Atget, Eugene, 114
at hand (Hamilton), 121
Atkins, Robert, 17
Attali, Jacques, 190; Noise: The Political
Economy of Music, 190
attendants, Hamiltons use of, 13941

aura: and experience, 47; power of,
163; of space, photograph and, 146
avant-garde, principles of (collage,
montage, and shock), 75
Aycock, Alice, 130
Baldessari, John, 39, 73, 91; Alignment
Series: Disaster Story Line (Getting It
Straight), 38
Baltimore Museum of Art, 189
Barber, Bruce, Remembering Vietnam,
15
Barry, Judith, 14
Barry, Robert, 107
Barthes, Roland, 63, 67, 73, 86, 94, 118,
147, 156; Camera Lucida, 82, 16061
Bartlett, Jennifer, 39
Baudrillard, Jean, 13, 156, 177, 211n32;
Simulacra and Simulation, 12
Becher, Bernd and Hilla, 7576, 114,
165
Beck, Martin, 28
Benjamin, Walter, 4, 87, 176, 181, 197;
on allegory, 202; on aura, 7; influence, 1011, 6667, 97; on mmoire
volontaire, 5; on modernity, 135; On
Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 4; on
photography, 20, 38, 6667, 84, 177
78, 189, 19899; Storyteller, 4; Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the
European Intelligentsia, 98; on wish
image, 167, 185; Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 4
Bergson, Henri, 5, 4546, 54, 56, 139,
199, 214n18; Creative Evolution, 45
Between and Including (exhibition), 96
INDEX
Beuys, Joseph, 128, 131

Bishop, Claire, 89, 123, 130; Installation Art: A Critical History, 117, 126,
128
Black Panthers, 9394
Black Race Horse (Stull), 58
Blade Runner (film), 16
Blau, Douglas, 9293
Bleckner, Ross, 13
Blue (sky over Los Alamos, New Mexico,
5/5/00, morning effect) (Finch), 12930
bodily experience, 137; Bergson on, 45;
in Hamiltons work, 119, 132, 205; in
Matta-Clarks work, 48, 70; and nostalgia, 187, 192; in performance art
and body art, 8; and photography, 27,
15663; and time, 172, 199; of viewer,
7, 1920, 22, 34, 36, 41, 118, 128,
149; of work and photographs of
work, 11719
bodily intimacy, 134
bodily memory, 4, 10, 12, 21, 134, 165,
167, 17779, 18789, 198
bodily perception, 125
body art, 3, 9
body knowledge, 13436
body object series (Hamilton), 120
Boltanski, Christian, 15, 13031; Chases
High School, 131; Les Habits de Franois C, 131
Boris, Eileen, 136
Bosley B2 camera, 103
Bott, Karsten: Archive of Contemporary
History, 91; One of Each, 91
Bound Square (Winsor), 134
Bourdieu, Pierre, 104
Bourriaud, Nicolas, 89
Boym, Svetlana, 104

Bradley, Slater, Doppelganger Trilogy,
18889
Brauntuch, Troy, 14
bricklayers, Gilbreths study of, 13839
Brockton, Massachusetts, 9091
Broken Record Blues (Oppenheim), 30,
70
Broodthaers, Marcel, 73, 7576, 90, 107,
114
Brunelle, Al, 50
Bruno, Giuliana, 97
Buchloh, Benjamin, 7576
Buckingham, Matthew, 88, 165, 186,
199, 204, 206; Image of Absalon to Be
Projected until It Vanishes, 17374;
Situation Leading to a Story, 171,
17376, 175, 17886, 180, 184; Six
Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year
502,002 C.E., 93
Buck-Morss, Susan, 167
Bunn, David, 91
Burden, Chris, 15
Buren, Daniel, 29
Buskirk, Martha, 26, 143; The Contingent Object of Contemporary Art, 10
Bykert Gallery, New York, 47
cabinet of curiosity, 91
Cadava, Eduardo, 97, 19899
California, 11213
camera obscura, 17273
capitalism, 60, 104, 12325, 136
caption, of photograph, 38
car culture, 113
catalog: for Artists Space show, 6567;
as narrative and archive, 3840, 6970;
241
242
INDEX
for the picture is still, 14754; of

Rooms exhibition, 3840, 6970; as
supplement to installation art, 119,
14243
catalog photography, conventions of,
153
Center for Land Use Interpretation, Los
Angeles, 91
Cerro de Pasco Company, 18081
Charlesworth, Sarah, 15
Charlottesville, Virginia, 145, 157
Chases High School (Boltanski), 131
Chave, Anna, 134
cherry tree, Matta-Clark and, 48
Chicago, Judy, 123; Dinner Party, 137
Cibachromes, 41, 80, 8687
CinKodak Model A camera, 176
civil rights movement, 123
Cixous, Hlne, Coming to Writing
and Other Essays, 134, 16162
Clark, Lygia, 128
Clausen, Barbara, 10
Cleveland, Ohio, 98
Code: Survey (Green), 11114, 11213
Cokes, Tony, 165, 206; Headphones, 171,
19094, 191, 196200
Colette, Davids Wraith, 30
collaboration, interpretation as, 14346
collage, 53, 55, 91, 106, 111; in film,
9798
collecting practice, 3, 84
color, and photographic film, 1034
color slide, 1034
Columbia Music, 193
Columbus, Ohio, 118
conceptual art movement, 73, 114
Conical Intersect (Matta-Clark), 48
consciousness, as result of perception,

214n18
consumer culture, 7576
contingency, 36, 38, 125, 143, 203; and
photography, 38, 44, 15354
contingent, the, 36, 136
continuity, in Matta-Clarks Splitting, 54
Cooke, Lynne, 16
Copjec, Jane, 160
Cornell University, 42
corpus (Hamilton), 121
craftsman ideal, 13441
craft tradition, 13441
Crary, Jonathan, 18
Crimp, Douglas, 66; Mourning and
Militancy, 1617
Dada, 75
Daguerre, Louis-Jacques Mand, 4647,
8384
daguerreotype sitters, 15758
DArcangelo, Christopher, 24, 5862, 65,
6970, 204; untitled work, 61
database structure, in installation art,
77, 11112
David, Jacques-Louis, Death of Marat, 30
Davids Wrai th (Colette), 30
Davis, Angela, 78, 9394
Davis, Fred, 104, 195
Day without Art (Visual AIDS), 17
Dean, Basil, 166
Dean, Tacita, 7677, 16769, 183, 199,
204, 206; Floh, 16667; Green Ray,
166; Kodak, 16571, 16970, 185;
Searching for Spiral Jetty, 167; Teignmouth Electron, 166
de Antonio, Emile, 79
INDEX
de-architecturalization, 108
Death of Marat (David), 30
deictic index, 37
Deitcher, David, 14
Deleuze, Gilles, 56
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 11, 26, 37, 67, 203;
Truth in Painting, 68
Dewey, John, 125, 162; Art as Experience, 122
Dia Art Foundation, 130, 143, 226n4
Dick, Philip K., 16
digital: archives, 111; clocks, 13; databases, 7677, 111; file names, 193;
files, 194; imagery, 183; media and
technology, 21, 102, 145, 16465,
170, 183, 18990, 19698, 2067;
present, 183; reproduction, 192
Dinner Party (Chicago), 137
Dion, Mark, 88, 9091; New England
Digs, 9091
distancing, 2, 118
Doane, Mary Ann, 56, 3536, 38, 97,
125, 131, 136, 162, 176, 179, 199, 203
document: changing notion of, 88; and
monument, 8081; in Partially Buried Continued, 100102; photograph
as, 1089, 147, 160
documentation, in work of Matta-Clark,
4142
Documentations (exhibition), 46
Donovan, Tara, 129; Transplanted, 129
Doors, Floors, Doors (Matta-Clark), 33,
34
Doppelganger Trilogy (Bradley), 18889
Dorner, Alexander, 87
Doubletake (exhibition), 16
Duchamp, Marcel, 36, 65
Durant, Sam, 7677

duration, 56
dure, 54
Ealing Film Studios, 166
Earth Art (exhibition), 42
Eastman, George, 176
Egypt, French expedition of 1809, 83
Eiki Slim Line Projector, 18283
endings, in work of Dean, 16768
entropy, and site-specific art, 49
ephemerality: and art practices, 3, 910,
23; of film, 97; and installation art,
23, 23, 121, 202; and memory, 165,
178; and modernity, 36, 202; and
nostalgia, 194; and site-specific art,
42, 202
epic forgetting, 207
ergon, 26, 67, 69
ethnographic displays, 8586, 90
Evans, Walker, 165
exhibition catalog. See catalog
exhibition space, relationship with artwork and viewer, 2935
experience: art as, 7, 12327; and art
discourse, 12123; and aura, 47; of
craft, 13641; exceeding frame, 27; in
Hamiltons work, 13142; historical,
197; and image, 16263; and installation art, 12, 79, 36, 11719, 12731;
and memory, 155; in modernity, 178;
of nostalgia, 192; in photography,
15354, 179; of time, 172, 176. See
also bodily experience; sensory
experience
experimental video, as postmodernist
art form, 195
243
244
INDEX
face to face (Hamilton), 15662, 159

Faller, Marion, No. 782 Apple Advancing, 95
Family of Man (exhibition), 8586
feminism, 123, 134
Ferrer, Rafael, 65
fetish: photograph as, 84, 87; wish image
as, 167
film: as archive of images, 9697, 99;
avant-garde, 97; as database, 99;
ephemerality of, 97; as evocative
object, 18287. See also names of artists and titles of works
film, photographic, 17071; and color,
1034. See also types of film
film and video installations, 17173. See
also names of artists and titles of works
film fragments, artists use of, 17476
filmmaker, role of, in films, 99100
film projector, as evocative object,
18283, 18687
film stills, 64
Finch, Spencer, 129; Blue (sky over Los
Alamos, New Mexico, 5/5/00, morning
effect), 12930
Fischli, Peter, 189
5000 Artists Return to Artists Space (catalog), 5962
Flavin, Dan, 127
Floh (Dean), 16667
Foote, Nancy, 2829, 32, 3940, 69
Foster, Hal, 3, 14, 7374, 7677, 109,
16667
Foucault, Michel, 1819, 88, 188, 199,
211n32; Archaeology of Knowledge,
8081
frame and framing, 9091, 93; artists
and, 203; as boundary and signifier,
52; breaking of, 2425, 4148;

exhibition catalogs and, 24; of exhibition space, 65; functions of, 25,
4243; in installation art, 4148,
6771, 136, 139, 203; of interactions
between artwork, exhibition space,
and viewer, 2935; in media installation, 198200; as metaphor for formalism, 43; and modernism, 2425;
in photography, 4148, 70, 108, 112,
144, 179, 204; and production of
meaning, 86; and site-specific art,
4850; of visual interest, 87
Frampton, Hollis, 82, 89, 9597, 102,
114; Magellan, 96; No. 782 Apple
Advancing, 95; Nostalgia, 96; Sixteen
Studies from Vegetable Locomotion,
95, 95; Visitation of Insomnia, 95
franchising, of art institutions, 127
Frankfurt School, 207
Fried, Michael, 7, 124; Art and Objecthood, 124
From Here I Saw What Happened and I
Cried (Weems), 92
Fury, Gran, 17
gallery: as articulated space, 3940; and
film/video installations, 199200; as
frame, 2425; and installation art, 26.
See also names of galleries; white cube
Garrels, Gary, 17
genealogy, 10710; and memory, 1819
gesture, in craft production, 13739
ghost: a border act (Hamilton), 12,
14445, 157
Gibbons, Joan, 209n2; Contemporary
Art and Memory, 17
INDEX
Gibson, William, 16
Gilbreth, Frank B., 5, 13841, 153; Lillian B. Gilbreth in Motion Study, 141
Gillette, Frank, 29
Glenn, John, 195
Global Taste (Rosler), 15
Goldberg, Reesa, 142
Gonzlez, Jennifer, 90, 204; ideology of
seeing, 87
Grace, Trudie, 57
Graham, Dan, 107; Homes for America,
189
Graham, Rodney, Torqued Chandelier
Release, 189
Grand Canyon, 19394, 196
Green, Mr., 103, 1056, 1089
Green, Rene, 72115, 117, 164, 16668,
202, 2045; Code: Survey, 11114,
11213; Import/Export Funk Office,
99, 11112; Korea Slides, 100, 106;
Partially Buried, 72, 98, 110, 185;
Partially Buried Continued, 75, 89, 98,
100111, 186; Partially Buried in
Thr ee Parts, 3, 7273, 7576, 7880,
79, 81, 85, 8889, 9394, 101, 114,
18485; and serial structure, 9394,
101, 111; Some Chance Operations,
96100; and use of sound, 18485
Greenberg, Clement, 7, 12324
Green Light Corridor (Nauman), 130
Green Ray (Dean), 166
Guffey, Elizabeth E., 192, 19495
Guggenheim Museum, 127, 171, 18889
Haacke, Hans, 65; Shapolsky et al, 91
Haber, Ira Joel, 35
Habits de Franois C, Les (Boltanski), 131
Hae Sun Kim, 106, 110

Halley, Peter, 13
Hamilton, Ann, 15, 11663, 2046;
aleph, 140; at hand, 121; body object
series, 120; corpus, 121; face to face,
15662, 159; ghost: a border act, 12,
14445, 157; mantle, 132, 133, 143;
myein, 121, 139; and photographic
documentation, 14247; photographs, 15662; the picture is still,
11621, 134, 137, 14345, 14754,
148, 151, 15152, 154, 15657; room
in pursuit of a position, 120; suitably
positioned, 120; tropos, 140, 143
Hammons, David, 15
Handy, Ellen, 202
Hanover Landesmuseum, 87
Happening, 15556
Harris, Suzanne, 28, 36, 125; Peace for
the Temporal Highway, 3435
Hayward Gallery, London, 16
Headphones (Cokes), 171, 19094, 191,
196200
Heiss, Alanna, 23, 25, 28, 40
heterotopia, installation art as, 1820,
101, 188, 199200
Highstene, Jene, 29, 39
Hiroshima, 118
Hirschhorn, Tho mas, 76
historical images, in Hamiltons work,
13142
history: African American, 90; in art
world of 1980s and 1990s, 1217;
gleaned from material fragments,
17476; as memory (Foucault),
8081; Native American, 93; of
objects, 4; in Partially Buried Contin-
245
246
INDEX
ued, 100102; physical presence of,

76; as representation, 1057; resurrection of, 14; as sensory experience,
18688; as time, 107; transformation
into myth, 2. See also archaeology
Hller, Carsten, 130
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 8283, 96, 201
Holocaust, 131, 211n43
Holt, Nancy, 107
home movies, as memory ritual, 176
77, 18182
Homes for America (Graham), 189
Hotel Palenque (Smithson), 108, 110
Howell, John, 14
H RR R and H PE (Wilson), 93
Huyssen, Andreas, 164, 211n43
Identity Stretch (Oppenheim), 70
ideology of seeing, 87
Ikeda, Ryoji, 130; Spectra II, 130
Iles, Chrissie, 186, 206
image, and experience, 16263
Image of Absalon to Be Projected until It
Vanishes (Buckingham), 17374
immersion, and art discourse, 12123
I mode, 12425, 155
Import/Export Funk Office (Green), 99,
11112
Incendiary Wafers (Matta-Clark), 4748
Incidents of Mirror Travel in the Yucatan
(Smithson), 78, 108
index, 37, 73, 80. See also deictic index
indexicality, 32; and presentness, 36
indexical present, 63
indexical trace, 37
installation art: archival, 8991; in art
history of contemporary art, 1, 24;
and ephemerality, 23, 23, 121, 202;

and experience, 12, 79, 36, 11719,
12731; frame and framing in,
4148, 6771, 136, 139, 203; as heterotopia, 1820, 101, 188, 199200;
introduced to museums, 23; light in,
12930; and memory, 2, 74, 2017;
and modernist painting, 2327; moving images as, 17173; perception in,
36, 12830; performer in, 12021;
relation to photography, 79, 27,
11819; sound in, 18385. See also
names of artists and titles of works
Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 28
Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston),
13, 129, 194
interpretation, as collaboration, 143
interviews, use in film, 98
Into the Light: The Projected Image in
Contemporary Art (exhibition), 206
Ireland, Craig, 7, 12123
Ireland, Patrick (Brian ODoherty), 35;
Rope Drawing No. 19, 3234. See also
ODoherty, Brian
Irigaray, Luce, This Sex, Which Is Not
One, 134
Irwin, Robert, 124
Istanbul Biennial, 131
Ito, Tetsuo, 149
Jacob, Mary Jane, 15
Jameson, Fredric, 19598, 211n32;
Postmodernism, 1213
Jam Handy, 191, 193
Janssens, Ann Veronica, Whos Afraid of
Blue, Red, and Yellow, 129
Japanese internment in World War II, 113
INDEX
Jauss, Hans-Robert, 122

Jay, Martin, 122
Jeanson, Thibault, 14347, 149, 15152
John Gibson Gallery, 46
Johns, Jasper, 108
Jones, Amelia, 23, 9, 27, 45, 111, 154,
162; Self/Image, 160
journeying through archives, 96100
Journeys from Berlin (Rainer), 9799
Jump (Thater and Mason), 189
Kaiper, Bruce, 137
Kapoor, Anish, 129; Past, Present,
Future, 129
Kaprow, Allan, 12526, 12829, 153,
15556, 203; Apple Shrine, 126; Happenings and Environments, 8; Six
Ordinary Happenings, 156; Transfer,
15556; Yard, 126
Kaye, Nick, 11, 54
Kelley, Jeff, 156
Kent State University, killings of student
protesters at, 3, 72, 7880, 85, 8889,
93, 106, 185
Kester, Grant, 211n42
Kim, Hae Sun, 106, 110
Kingsley, April, 6465
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 84
Kodachrome 64 film, 170
Kodachrome slide film, 103
Kodachrome Super 8 film, 170
Kodak (Dean), 16571, 16970, 185
Kodak Company, 16571, 176; film production, 16571; and slide show, 1025
Kodaslide color transparency projector,
103
Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp, 212n49
Koons, Jeff, 13
Korean War, 100102, 1059
Korea Slides (Green), 100, 106
Kosuth, Joseph, 28, 41, 65
Kounellis, Jannis, 212n49
Kracauer, Siegfried, 118
Krauss, Rosalind, 28, 3637, 57, 6566,
74, 114, 12527, 213n14, 217n4; Notes
on the Index, 32, 57, 6566, 70
Krens, Tho mas, 12627
Kruger, Barbara, 17, 92
Kwangju, 98, 100101, 106, 10910
Kwangju Biennial, 109
Kwon, Miwon, 3, 1112, 16, 74, 10910
Labowitz, Leslie, 123
Lacan, Jacques, 160
Lacy, Suzanne, 123
Lambert-Beatty, Carrie, 8
Lampson, Mary, 79
language, as framing device, 62
Latin America, 12829
Lawler, Louise, 1415, 24, 5860, 6566,
6970, 92, 204; Arranged by Louise
Lawler, 92; untitled work, 60
Lawson, Tho mas, 1314
layered structure, 190, 196
Lee, Pamela, 42
Le Feuvre, Lisa, 201
Levine, Sherrie, 13
LeWitt, Sol, 89, 94, 96, 114, 205
library card catalog, as found language,
91
Liebmann, Lisa, 14
lieux de mmoire, 182
light, in installation art, 12930
Line Describing a Cone (McCall), 173
247
248
INDEX
Line Drawing (Swartz), 130

Linker, Kate, 14
Los Alamos, New Mexico, 12930
Los Angeles Public Library, discarded
card catalog, 91
______, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper
and Cindy Sherman Have Agreed to
Participate in an Exhibition Organized by Janelle Reiring at Artists
Space . . . , 5769
Lukcs, Georg, History and Class Consciousness, 135
Magellan (Frampton), 96
Manovich, Lev, 77, 99
mantle (Hamilton), 132, 133, 143
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), 99
Marclay, Christian, 194
Marcuse, Herbert, 136; One-Dimensional Man, 207
Marey, tienne-Jules, 138
Marien, Mary Warner, 4647
Marker, Chris, 97
Marx, Karl, 49
Mary Boone Gallery, 92
Maryland Historical Society, 90
Mason, T. Kelly, Jump, 189
mass media: and amateur photography,
103; Barthes on, 94; and memory, 14,
195; and nostalgia, 192; as source of
images, 15, 89; and visual codes, 64
Mass MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts), 121, 126
materiality, 16465; of film, 186; and
framing, 38; immersive, 12829; of
photographs, 19; of plastic, in Deans
Kodak, 168
Matta-Clark, Gordon, 2829, 35, 37, 39,

68, 70, 130, 201, 2045; Conical Intersect, 48; Doors, Floors, Doors, 33, 34;
Incendiary Wafers, 4748; Museum,
47; Office Baroque, 53; Pier In/Out,
149, 150; Rope Bridge, 42; Splitting,
2324, 4157, 51, 53, 55, 153, 204
McCall, Anthony, 186; Line Describing a
Cone, 173
media installation, and passage of time,
198200
media nostalgia, in contemporary art,
18896
medium (artistic), defined in terms of
relationship between viewer and
object, 74
mmoire involontaire, 4
mmoire volontaire, 5
memory, 2, 128, 13031; in art world of
1980s and 1990s, 1217; commodification of, 1415; conditioned by
technologies, 4; and ephemerality,
165, 178; and experience, 155; in film
and video installations in 2000s, 164
200; in Hamiltons work, 13142; as
history, 8081; and installation art, 2,
74, 2017; materialization of, 1819,
88; and myth, 7576; in Partially Buried Continued, 100102; and perception, 5456; and photography, 177
79; reification of, 1415; and sensation, 128, 18688; slide show as,
1025; time as, 107. See also archival
memory; bodily memory
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 8
Merzbau (Schwitters), 43
meta-frame, 26
INDEX
Metro Pictures, 92
Metz, Christian, 84
Mexico, 108
Meyer, James, 11, 74, 109
Miami Art Museum, 132
Michener, James, Kent State, 78, 80, 86,
89
Middletown, Connecticut, 15556
Minimalism, 8, 7374, 9495, 12629,
172, 203
Mining the Museum (Wilson), 90
mirrors, and photography, 42
Miss, Mary, 36, 125, 130; Sapping, 35
mist installations (Janssens), 129
Mixed Metaphors (exhibition), 90
modernism, 124, 219n31; decline of,
1213; and elevation of vision, 4344;
and framing, 2425; and futurism,
195; Matta-Clarks break with, 4243;
and passage of time, 202
modernist painting, 7; installation art
and, 2327
modernity, 135; and ephemerality, 36,
202
Mondloch, Kate, 127, 172
monument: and document, 8081;
Mount Rushmore, 93
Morris, Robert, 26, 126, 12829, 132,
154, 161; Notes on Sculpture, 94;
The Present Tense of Space, 12425,
172
Morris, William, 136
Morse, Margaret, 172, 186
Morse, Samuel F. B., 25
movie theater: as heterotopia, 188; as
interior space, 17273
moving images, as installation art, 17173
Mullican, Matt, 57
Muoz, Juan, 212n49
Muse dart moderne de la ville (Paris),
90, 127
Museum (Matta-Clark), 47
museum industry, 127
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver,
182
Museum of Modern Art (New York),
8587, 142
museums, and photographic exhibitions, 8586
Muybridge, Eadweard J., 82, 138; Animal Locomotion: Walking Taking Off
Hat, 6; motion studies, 45
myein (Hamilton), 121, 139
Naples, 96100
narrative: catalog as, 3840; of decline,
9394; Greens work as, 77
narrative structure, 11415
National Trust (U.K.), 83
Native American history, 93
Nauman, Bruce, Green Light Corridor, 130
Neoconcretist sculpture, 128
Neo-geo movement, 13
Neo-pop, 13
Neo-surrealism, 13
Neto, Ernesto, 128; Walking in Venus
Blue Cave, 12829
networks, photographs and, 8889
New Bedford, Massachusetts, 9091
New Dimensions in Sound (Jam Handy),
193
New England Digs (Dion), 9091
new genre public art, 123
Niepce, Nicphore, 47
249
250
INDEX
No. 782 Apple Advancing (Faller and

Frampton), 95
Nora, Pierre, 197, 212n43; Between
Memory and History, 182
nostalgia, 104, 106, 165, 18788, 206;
Cokess use of, 19094; complexity of,
19496; as form of critique, 185. See
also media nostalgia
Nostalgia (Frampton), 96
nostalgia epidemic, 195
Notari, Elvira, 97
objects: evocative, 164, 18286, 18994,
19798; materiality of, 13031
Odessa, Russia, 99
ODoherty, Brian (Patrick Ireland), 2426,
28, 43, 52, 68, 124; Inside the White
Cube, 25
Office Baroque (Matta-Clark), 53
Ohio Historical Society, 118
Oiticica, Hlio, 8, 12829
Olander, William, 1415, 17
One of Each (Bott), 91
On New York 11 (Williams), 15
On the Road: Art against AIDS (exhibition), 17
Oppenheim, Dennis, 35, 42, 68; Broken
Record Blues, 30, 70; Identity Stretch, 70
Ossining, New York, 17980
OSullivan, Timothy, 87
outmoded media, as evocative objects,
18286, 18994, 19798
Owens, Craig, 4, 1011, 42, 108, 202, 204
panorama format, for photographing
installation art, 145, 147
panoramas, 14546
parergon, 2627, 37, 6769

Partially Buried (Green), 72, 98, 110, 185
Partially Buried Continued (Green), 75,
89, 98, 100111, 186
Partially Buried in Thr ee Parts (Green),
3, 7273, 7576, 7880, 79, 81, 85,
8889, 9394, 101, 114, 18485
Partially Buried Woodshed (Robert
Smithson, 1970), 3, 72, 75, 101, 205
participation, and art discourse, 12123
Past, Present, Future (Kapoor), 129
Pat Hearn Gallery (New York), 7879
Peace for the Temporal Highway (Harris), 3435
perception, 128; Bergsonian scientific
approach to, 4546; and consciousness, 214n18; in installation art, 36,
12830; and memory, 5456
performance art, 12021
performer, in installation art, 12021
Peru, 18081
phenomenological vector, 217n4
photo album, as structuring principle,
16667
photographic archives, 201; as death, 84,
161; pre- and postwar, 75; as supplement to installation art, 119
photographic impulse, 133
photographic installation, 9193
photographic series, 8485
photographs: ambivalence of, 67; as artifacts, in installation art, 80; and aura
of work of art, 5; character of, 5; as
contingency, 38; as death, 161; denaturalizing and defetishizing, 87; as
discourse, 44, 46; distancing effect of,
118; as documents, 1089, 147, 160;
INDEX
and edges of images, 25; as evidence,

84; as fetishes, 84; as fine art, 8687;
as fragment in series, 8085; as frame,
70; as framed object, 199; fried, 46;
inadequacy of, 3536, 15456; as
indexes, 37, 63, 73, 80; limitations
of, 1; and mmoire volontaire, 5; as
memories, 910; and mirrors, 42; offframe space of, 8485; as paradigm
for Greens critical practice, 11011;
proliferation of, in 19th and 20th
centuries, 83; in science and industry,
56; as that has been, 82
photography: architectural, 14546; as
archive, 73; and contingency, 44; as
documentation, 52, 14247; as exploration of time, 82; inability to capture
experience, 15354; as language, 57;
linked to archive and museum collection, 83; and memory, 17779; modernist, 147; post-mortem, 104; role of
frame in, 4148; and Rooms exhibition, 3557; as self-sustaining process, 4142; in site-specific installation art, 7277
photography, theory of, 2; as technology
of vision, 1920
photography exhibitions, 8589
photojournalism, conventions of, 110
picture is still, the (Hamilton), 11621,
134, 137, 14345, 14754, 148, 151,
15152, 154, 15657
Pictures (exhibition), 6667
Pier In/Out (Matta-Clark), 149, 150
Pincus-Witten, Robert, 201
Pindell, Howardena, 35; Video Drawings, 29
pinhole camera, 157, 16062

Piper, Adrian, 14, 24, 58, 6266, 6970,
92, 2045; indexical present, 63
Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 108
Pistoletto, Michelangelo, 212n49
Places with a Past (exhibition), 15
plastic, materiality of, in Deans Kodak, 168
Pollock, Jackson, 203
Pompeii, ruins of, 98
portrait photography, 15662, 179
postcolonial politics, 123
postmedium practices, 203
postmodernism, 195
Pozzi, Lucio, 29, 32
present: grasp of, in twentieth century,
3536; indexical, 63
presentness, 124; conventions of, 42
Prince, Richard, 15
Prins, Gwyn, 63
Prix, Wolf, 146
protagonist, identification with, 97, 99100
Proust, Marcel, 5; Remembrance of
Thing s Past, 17778
Providence, Rhode Island, 9091
PS1 arts space (Queens, New York), 23,
2729
punctum, 161
Quandt, James, 171, 183
Rabinowitch, David, 29
Rainer, Yvonne, 8, 97; Journeys from
Berlin, 9798
RCA Company, 19094
reading, of image, 63, 74, 85, 87, 100,
109, 113, 115, 161, 204
recorded music, social effects of, 19094
251
252
INDEX
recording technologies, 8889, 19094;

development of, 8384; as evocative
objects, 18283
Reiring, Janelle, 5758, 6465, 68
Reiss, Julie, 2
relational aesthetics, 89
relational antagonism, 9
Rembrandt, 4
Remembering Vietnam (Barber), 15
Renaissance painting, 160
representation: history as, 1057; politics of, 72115, 202
retro, 19495. See also nostalgia
Richter, Gerhard, 7576, 212n49
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 139
Rist, Pipilotti, 160
Rogers, Alva, 15
room in pursuit of a position (Hamilton),
120
Rooms (exhibition), 23, 2729, 68, 91,
130, 153, 204; catalog, 3840; and
framing of interaction between artwork, exhibition space, and viewer,
2935; and photography, 3557
Rope Bridge (Matta-Clark), 42
Rope Drawing No. 19 (Ireland), 3234
Rosler, Martha, 14, 73; Global Taste, 15
Royoux, Jean-Christophe, 167
Rudolph, Paul, 8586
Rushmore, Mount, 93
Ruskin, John, 136
Ryman, Robert, untitled work from
Rooms exhibition, 31
safety film, 176
Salcedo, Doris, 13031
Saltzman, Lisa, Making Memory Matter, 17
Sandler, Irving, 57
Santos, Ren, 14
Sapping (Miss), 35
Schwitters, Kurt, Merzbau, 43
screens, artists focus on, 172
sculptural practice, 213n14
Searching for Spiral Jetty (Dean), 167
Seattle Art Museum, 90
Sekula, Allan, 62, 73, 80, 85, 87, 201
sensation, and recollection, 128, 13031
senses, transposition of, 158
sensory experience, history and memory as, 18688
Seoul, 98
serial structure, 101, 111
Serra, Richard, 28, 3031, 68, 124,
12829; Torqued Ellipses, 130
Shapolsky et al (Haacke), 91
Sharp, Willoughby, 42
Sheeler, Charles, 165
Sherman, Cindy, 15, 17, 24, 5758, 64,
66, 6870, 92, 204
shifter, the, 3637
Simon, Joan, 120, 143
Simpson, Lorna, 15
simulacra, and reality, 13
Singerman, Howard, 16
single-point perspective, 4344
site-specific art, 3, 1012, 70, 154, 204;
ephemeral, 42, 202; and frames,
4850; introduced to museums, 23;
photography and, 7277
site-specificity, defining, 74
Situation Leading to a Story (Buckingham),
171, 17376, 175, 17886, 180, 184
Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year
502,002 C.E. (Buckingham), 93
INDEX
Six Ordinary Happenings (Kaprow), 156

Sixteen Studies from Vegetable Locomotion (Frampton), 95, 95
slide projection, as bridge between photography and film, 107
slide show: as common space, 105;
family, 1057; as memory, 1025;
recontextualization of, 101; as travelogue, 1089
Smith, Valerie, 57
Smithson, Robert, 1011, 18, 42, 49, 73,
88, 101, 1079, 202; Hotel Palenque,
108, 110; Incidents of Mirror Travel in
the Yucatan, 78, 108; legacy, 7778,
167; Partially Buried Woodshed, 3, 72,
75, 101, 205; Spiral Jetty, 1011, 167,
202, 226n4
Smyth, Ned, Last Supper, 29
snapshots, 100, 1035, 10911, 166, 179
Sokolowski, Tho mas, 17
Solomon, Holly and Horace, 50
Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 14
Some Chance Operations (Green), 96100
sound, in installation art, 18385
spatial arts, 155
spectacle, and art discourse, 12123
Spectra II (Ikeda), 130
Spiral Jetty (Smithson), 1011, 167, 202,
226n4
Splitting (Matta-Clark), 2324, 4157,
51, 53, 55, 153, 204
Staniszewski, Mary Ann, 86
Steichen, Edward, 8586
Steinbach, Haim, 13
Stewart, Susan, 143
Stuart, Michelle, 29, 32
studium, 161
Stull, Henry, Black Race Horse, 58

Sublime Void, The: On the Memory of the
Imagination (exhibition), 212n49
Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 1415
suitably positioned (Hamilton), 120
Summers, David, 44
supplement, and contingency, 203
Surrealism, 43
Svilova, Elizaveta, 99
Swartz, Julianne, Line Drawing, 130
Szarkowski, John, 87
Taaffe, Philip, 13
Tagg, John, 201
Teignmouth Electron (Dean), 166
Terdiman, Richard, 212n43
text, use of, 5962
Tha ter, Diana, Jump, 189
Thompson, E. P., 12223, 13536, 155
Tibbets, Col. Paul W., Jr., 11718
time: and bodily experience, 172, 199;
experience of, 172, 176; history as,
107; materialization of, 13; in MattaClarks Splitting, 5456; as memory,
107; modernism and, 202; passage of,
in media installation, 198200
time-motion studies, 138
Torqued Chandelier Release (Graham), 189
Torqued Ellipses (Serra), 130
total cinema, 96
To the Rescue: Eight Artists in an Archive
(exhibition), 93
Transfer (Kaprow), 15556
Transplanted (Donovan), 129
travelogue, slide show as, 1089
tropos (Hamilton), 140, 143
Turkle, Sherry, 164
253
254
INDEX
Turrell, James, 129

Tuttle, Richard, 3031
Underground (film), 79
Urban Crude: The Oil Fields of the Los
Angeles Basin (CLUI), 91
Venice Biennale, 121
Vertov, Dziga, Man with a Movie Camera, 99
video, 3, 910, 2021, 23, 89; as archive,
97; and bodily experience, 160; and
evacuation of historical perspective,
19596; in installation art, 72
video and film installations, 15, 22,
17173. See also names of artists
and titles of works
Video Drawings (Pindell), 29
video screen, 113; embodied, 160
video stills, 29
Vienna, 131
viewer, relationship with artwork and
exhibition space, 2935
viewer space, 44
viewing, act of, 5765
vinegar syndrome, 174
vinyl LPs, 19094
vision, as supreme aesthetic sense,
4344
Visitation of Insomnia, A (Frampton), 95
visual codes, and mass media, 64
visual distortion, 120
von Schlegell, David, 120
Walking in Venus Blue Cave (Neto),

12829
Wall, Jeff, 212n49, 219n31
Wallis, Brian, 94
wandering, and relationship of viewer to
installation, 99100
Warburg, Aby, 75
Watney, Simon, 16
Weathermen, 79
weavers, 13436
Weems, Carrie Mae, From Here I Saw
What Happened and I Cried, 92
Weil, Sue, 35
Weiss, David, 189
Welchman, John C., 26
West, Nancy Martha, Kodak and the
Lens of Nostalgia, 104
Wexler, Haskell, 79
Wheeler, Doug, 29
white cube, 2526, 28, 34, 43, 117, 133,
199200, 206
Whiteread, Rachel, 212n49
Whitney Museum of American Art,
186; Biennial (2006), 189
Whos Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow
(Janssens), 129
Williams, Christopher, On New York 11, 15
Wilson, Fred, 88, 9293; Mining the
Museum, 90
Winer, Helene, 57
Winsor, Jackie, 134; Bound Square, 134
wish image, 167, 185, 190, 194, 197
X-PRZ, 190
Wagner, Anne, 52, 56

waiting, and duration, 56
walking, practice of, 97; Green and, 99
Yard (Kaprow), 126

Yokosuka, Japan, 117

Monica E. McTighe - Framed Spaces, Photography and Memory in Contemporary Installation Art (2012)

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framed spaces

I N T E R FA C E S : Studies in Visual Culture

This series, sponsored by Dartmouth College Press, develops and

Dartmouth College Press

Dartmouth College Press

2. Installations (Art) Themes,

Expanding the Frame

The Politics of Representation

The Poetics of Experience

Aura and Experience

F I G U R E I . 1 Eadweard J. Muybridge (18301904), Plat e 44, Walking Taking Off Hat,

to the problem of photographing an installation that focuses on the viewers

Installation Art and Experience

Photographs as Memories of Ephemeral Art Practices

work b ut als o t he film do cumenting i ts p roduction a nd S mithsons ess ay

of that relationship (demanded by Serra, for example), but rather on the

Among t hese des criptions o f va rieties o f si te-specificity a n in teresting

The memory evoked in these works is body-oriented memory that utilizes

Installation Art as Heterotopia

The Structure of This Book

sciously a bout t he wa y t heir p hotographs a nd in stallations w ere a rranged

expanding the frame

Installation Art and Modernist Painting

PS1 and Rooms

and warehouses.10 The PS1 building was a disused nineteenth-century school

Framing the Interactions between Artwork,

Rights Society (ARS), New York.

2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Another category of framing would include those installations in which the

The Rooms Exhibition and Photography

stimulus. Pho tography a nd film a ttempt t o ca pture t he p resent mo ment,

the shifter to the notion of an index: In so far as their meaning depends on

Catalog as Narrative and Archive

kind of content. In the catalog and photographic documentation of the work,

Breaking the Frame: Gordon Matta-Clarks Splitting

Gordon Matta-Clarks work bridges the division between installations or sited

Greenbergian mo dernisms ele vation o f visio n as t he su preme aest hetic

a consistent three-dimensional space subject to the same forces as the viewers

To understand t he dilemma t hat Matta-Clark faced in do cumenting his

These imag es o f t he na tural w orld ob tain t he ill usion o f co ntinuity b y

a chemical a nd p hysical p rocess w hich gi ves her t he p ower t o r eproduce

Site-Specific Art and Frames

processes of development and decay in time take place at many levels.52 In

The Artists Book Splitting as Time Frame and Archive

1 . 3 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, documentation, 1974. 2011 Estate of Gordon

Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

ian architecture: The entire web of meaning and associations generated by

slice o ut o f t he lo nger hist ory o f t he ho use. W hile t urning t he pag es, t he

1 . 4 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974. 2011 Estate of Gordon

Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

1 . 5 G ordon Matta-Clark, Splitting, collage, 1974.

2011 Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

expands into the present moment of somatic perception.62 Instead of being a

and silence o f the photographs. This points to photographys connection to

The Act of Looking: ___________, Louise Lawler, Adrian Piper and

Between Viewer and Artwork

In turning t he sp otlight around on t he vie wer and on t he street, L awler

1 . 6 L ouise Lawler, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.

1 . 7 C hristopher DArcangelo, untitled, 1978. Courtesy of Louise Lawler.

cites t he influences of artists, such as H ans Haacke, Joseph Kosuth, R afael

four reproductions of Shermans photographs. The catalog gives no c lue as

The Frames of Installations

The Historical Impact of Catalogs as Photographic Archives